Child Maintenance Service: Reform

Alison McGovern Excerpts

Thursday 19th May 2022 Westminster Hall

[Alison McGovern (Wirral South) (Lab)]

It is a real pleasure to serve under your chairship, Ms Rees. I begin by thanking the hon. Member for Motherwell and Wishaw (Marion Fellows) for securing this debate. All of us constituency MPs deal with child maintenance cases on a regular basis, and we owe her a debt of service for bringing this extremely important debate. To pay back a little bit, I am going to be brief, because she set out the case for reform very well, as did other Members who have contributed. I want to make three very brief points on behalf of the Opposition to ask the Minister a few questions. I know that we will all be keen and enthusiastic to hear what the Minister has to say. The case for change is broadly accepted and has been well made.

I will briefly respond to the hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon). He says that he is a traditionalist; I am a progressive. We differ on very many things, but I feel sure that we agree, as will every Member of this House, that what matters in this discussion is the children who should be supported by this money. I am sure that we will all put them first.

First, hon. Members who have spoken in this debate have been right to highlight the connection between being a single parent and the risk of poverty. We know that that is true. It has held true for a very long time in this country. That is why we believe that children are entitled to support from both parents, and that the Government ought to play their role in making sure that that happens, but also that children should not grow up poor in this country. It is anathema to all of us that there has been an increase in children needing support via food banks and other emergency charities. Every pound we can get into the pockets of their parents helps, whether it comes from this source or the welfare state.

This debate matters because this country should have a mission to end child poverty. Many of us still believe that. What we do with the Child Maintenance Service can make a real contribution to that. I put on the record my thanks to Gingerbread and two other charities that work very hard, year round, to stand up for single parents and make sure that the specific and different challenges they face as families are recognised in the system. As the NAO report pointed out, in the quarter ending September 2021, paying parents moving from direct pay on to collect and pay owed an average of £1,100—around five months of maintenance. Given the price hike of basics such as bread, putting petrol in the car or buying bus tickets, I can only imagine what that £1,000 means to a single-parent family. It is huge. Single parents are at the frontline of making ends meet in this country. We must put this debate in the right context, which is about stopping families from suffering the inequity and indignity of poverty.

Secondly, as other Members have already said, every Member of Parliament knows only too well what happens when the service goes wrong. The problems in my own case load have two features: the time taken to resolve issues is simply too long, as people find the length of time they are waiting incredibly stressful, and the enforcement action taken by the service is often not effective—a point that has been very well and amply made. That is frustrating and, as has been said, often dissuades people from using the service at all. I cannot believe that a Government of any colour or hue would want an important public service such as this one to put people off.

I am anxious to hear from the Minister about the plans for reform. I hope that we can move quickly to get a better service, not least given that the NAO found that it could take years before payments are made. The NAO also uncovered the issue of enforcement, and said that it

“has not been properly built into the Universal Credit system”.

I think the Government will want to address that.

Finally, I agree with fellow Members on the issue of domestic abuse. Unfortunately, I know only too well from my own constituents that parents who are victims of domestic abuse often see that abuse continued via the officers of the state. Again, I do not believe that a Government of any kind would wish their own services or operations to be used by perpetrators of abuse to continue their abuse once a relationship has come to an end. I simply do not believe that any Government would want that.

We are learning much more about how this continuation of abuse is done and how institutions of the state can protect against that. As the hon. Member for Motherwell and Wishaw said, it is crucial that we have a trauma-informed service in every function of DWP work and that we continually look to reform, given that we now know more about how domestic abuse is perpetrated. I hope the Minister will respond to those three points about poverty, improving the service so that it actually does what we want it to and making sure that it is informed by the suffering and trauma of victims of domestic abuse, and I look forward to listening to what he has to say.