Child Support Collection (Domestic Abuse) Bill

Baroness Sherlock Excerpts

2nd reading
Friday 21st April 2023 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Sherlock (Lab)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Farmer, for introducing this Bill and all noble Lords who have spoken. As we have heard, the main aim of the Bill is simply to make it possible for parents who have experienced domestic abuse to ask the Child Maintenance Service to collect maintenance payments on their behalf, thus avoiding the need to communicate with the abusive parent. At the moment, they would first have to try to arrange payment directly with the abusive parent via the direct pay system and wait for that to fail, which is obviously risky.

We know that the stakes are very high in relation to domestic abuse. The noble Baronesses, Lady Berridge and Lady Burt, have mentioned the tragic case of Emma Day, who was murdered by her ex-partner in May 2017. That case could not be more directly relevant here: he had warned her not to chase him for child support, threatening her life if she did so. When she pursued her claim, he stabbed her to death. I am sure all noble Lords would like to join me in sending our sympathies to Emma Day’s family and friends, and all those who mourn her and will do so for years to come.

After Emma’s inquest, the coroner issued a regulation 28 report to prevent future deaths. It noted that Ms Day had told the CMS of the threat to her life but this was not passed to the known caseworker. The report says:

“Staff were not fully and consistently trained in domestic violence. There was no action to address the potential escalation of the risk on reinstating the claim”.


The coroner called for a review of the protocols and training of child maintenance caseworkers and then in due course, as we have heard, the report by Dr Samantha Callan looking at the CMS response to domestic abuse was published in April last year, with the Government’s response in January. I too thank Dr Callan for her work on this subject as well as Gingerbread and Surviving Economic Abuse for their campaigns for change.

We on these Benches support the Bill. It represents a welcome step forward in improving the way that the child support system serves the parents and children who suffer as a result of domestic abuse. That said, the actual impact of the Bill will depend very much on future decisions on matters that will be dealt with in regulations and operational guidance, so there are some important questions on which we need more information.

First, as noted by the noble Baroness, Lady Burt, we do not yet know what evidence of domestic abuse will be accepted by the CMS. We know it will be detailed in secondary legislation, and at Second Reading in the Commons the Minister, Tom Pursglove, committed the Government to consulting widely and said the aim would be to produce requirements

“that are sensitive to the needs of domestic abuse victims”.—[Official Report, Commons, 28/10/22; col. 568.]

That is good, but can the Minister offer us any more information? Since he is the Minister for child support, can he assure us that he is already in discussions with colleagues in other government departments to ensure consistency on matters of domestic abuse across government? Would he be willing to publish the regulations in draft so that Peers could consider them before they were finalised, or at least to engage with Peers as part of that wider consultation exercise? I would be grateful if he would reflect on that.

That leads to the second issue: how ready the CMS is to deal with these changes or with domestic abuse more broadly. Since the Emma Day tragedy, training on domestic abuse has been introduced for CMS staff. In Committee in the Commons, the Minister, Mims Davies, said that

“with particular input from Women’s Aid, a programme of domestic abuse training has been designed and delivered for all CMS caseworkers”.—[Official Report, Commons, Child Support Collection (Domestic Abuse) Public Bill Committee, 14/12/22; col. 10.]

The Minister will know that my honourable friend Jess Phillips expressed some concerns about whether the training was adequate and queried whether Women’s Aid was indeed involved in designing and delivering it. I sought the view of Women’s Aid on this issue. I was told it recommends that all CMS staff should get specialist domestic abuse training from a specialist provider to ensure that they can understand the risks facing survivors and provide a safe response. However, Women’s Aid understands that the CMS training is not designed or run by specialists but has been developed and is delivered in-house within the CMS. It told me:

“The National Training Centre at Women’s Aid assessed the delivery of one of these in-house training sessions and was severely concerned by it. Women’s Aid provided feedback to them in this regard but we had no further input or role in the training.”


Can the Minister please clarify what training is given to CMS staff and who designs and delivers it?

I have also heard concerns from charities of cases where the response of CMS staff to their disclosure of domestic abuse was not what one would have hoped. Gingerbread surveyed single parents with experience of domestic abuse and found that most did not think CMS staff had given appropriate consideration to their situation as survivors. One parent said:

“I was told that I wasn’t a victim of domestic abuse because I hadn’t experienced physical violence”.


Another said:

“The whole system was very stressful and I tried to explain how dangerous he was and how scared we were but I was just told either it’s direct pay or they will charge me lots of money and my daughter will lose out.”


How confident is the Minister that CMS staff are trained and resourced to deal appropriately at all levels with parents facing domestic abuse?

There is then the question of charges, which has been touched on already. The Government’s 2012 reforms of child support used charging to push parents into handling maintenance between themselves, without involving the state. If they make a private arrangement, there is no fee; if they use direct pay, there is just a £20 application fee. But if they use collect and pay, a collection charge of 20% of the maintenance liability is levied on the paying parent, as we have heard, and 4% on the parent receiving the money. But the whole point of this Bill is to ensure that parents who cannot safely use direct pay without putting themselves or their children at risk will in future be able to use the collect and pay service—getting the CMS to collect the money for them—without having to have contact with the abusive parent.

If the CMS accepts that someone has produced evidence that they are experiencing domestic abuse, it waives the £20 application fee. But it does not waive the 4% of the total maintenance liability fee if they use the collect and pay service. At Third Reading in the Commons, my honourable friend Vicky Foxcroft put it like this. She said that

“they are then effectively penalised every month simply for using a service that stops them having to have contact with their abusive ex-partner. I hope we can all agree that that is grossly unfair”.—[Official Report, Commons, 3/3/23; col. 1008.]

In Committee the Minister, Mims Davies, had said:

“Full consideration is being given to exempting victims of domestic abuse from collection charges”.—[Official Report, Commons, Child Support Collection (Domestic Abuse) Bill Committee, 14/12/22; col. 9.]


Can the Minister tell the House where this consideration has got to and when it will conclude?

This takes me to timing more generally. I think we are all hopeful that the Bill will become an Act this Session, in the not-too-distant future. But given that nothing can happen until we get the secondary legislation and the guidance, as so much of the detail will be in that, can the Minister give us at least an outline target timetable for when that might come on stream?

I want to make a final point about enforcement, which seems to be a problem with child support. I do not know whether I need to declare a very historic interest: a long time ago, I was on the board of the Child Maintenance and Enforcement Commission, so I understand the background to this. I have been looking at the CMS statistics and for the last quarter, to December 2022, under half of parents due to pay through collect and pay paid even the 90% that the noble Baroness, Lady Berridge, mentioned, while 35% of those on collect and pay paid nothing. Thirty-five per cent of those for whom the CMS was collecting the money paid not one pound. That is over 140,000 children for whom none of the maintenance due was paid, and this matters.

A 2019 study by Hakovirta et al found that if child maintenance were paid in full to all children in separated families living in poverty who are not getting money from their other parent, it could lift 60% of them out of poverty. It makes that much difference, so I ask the Minister, first: is the problem with enforcement in CMS about a lack of staff, a lack of money or a lack of powers? What is the drag on this? Secondly, I was really worried to hear that there is now a real backlog in CMS, with thousands of claims not even yet assigned to the service. Can the Minister tell the House if this is so and how many claims are waiting?

The noble Baroness, Lady Berridge, raised some really interesting questions. I will happily leave the Minister to respond to them, but I will listen with great interest to what he has to say. They sounded really important and are a sign to us all, and indeed to the Government, of the need to think across all areas when considering something as all-encompassing as domestic abuse.

Despite these concerns, we welcome this Bill and congratulate again the noble Lord, Lord Farmer, on introducing it here and the honourable Sally-Ann Hart MP on steering it though the Commons. I hope the Government will continue to build on this legislation and, more widely, the Domestic Abuse Act 2021 to deliver a strong, co-ordinated cross-government approach to domestic abuse.