Separated Families Initiative

Debate between Kate Green and Pamela Nash

Tuesday 21st October 2014 Westminster Hall

[Kate Green (Stretford and Urmston) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve in the debate under your chairmanship, Mr Streeter. Unlike the Minister—it is good to see her in her place—I am not moonlighting. I am a former director of the National Council for One Parent Families, which has since merged with Gingerbread, so this is part of my brief. I join my hon. Friend the Member for Edinburgh East (Sheila Gilmore) in thanking Gingerbread for the helpful briefing it has given many of us in preparation for the debate.

I welcome the debate, and I congratulate my hon. Friend, who raises an important issue in relation to the separation of parents and the financial arrangements that follow separation. The issue is perhaps too little in the public eye these days, which is in stark contrast to the 1990s, when child support issues dominated MPs’ postbags. I fear that the reason is not that the difficulties we saw in earlier years between parents have gone away, but that too many parents have given up hope of ever seeing any maintenance at all.

I recognise that there were considerable difficulties with the legacy 1993 and 2003 schemes, and I strongly recognise the need for reform. I also acknowledge that the new 2012 scheme is being introduced carefully by a stable and respected team in the DWP—there are lessons there for other DWP projects. However, I have long been concerned about the overall objectives of the 2012 scheme. I cannot help feeling that the overarching objective is to get as many parents as possible out of the statutory scheme and into voluntary arrangements to bring in fee income for the Government—according to a written answer from 10 December last year to Lord Kirkwood of Kirkhope, the income is estimated to reach approximately £1.2 billion by 2022-23—and to cut costs. While it may be argued that voluntary arrangements between parents, freely and equally entered into by them, will often produce the best outcomes, the new scheme means that many more parents will not choose those arrangements but will, effectively, be coerced into them. The jury is out on what that will mean in practice for their success.

Of course, the overarching objective of the new scheme should be to get maintenance flowing for the benefit of children. Yet neither the Government’s express intentions, nor the monitoring data that we have been able to get, nor the help and support for separated families initiative described by my hon. Friends, have focused, as far as I can see, on that specific goal. Yesterday I received a written answer from the Minister for Pensions, who said he could not tell me, with respect to new applications to the scheme, what change there had been in the proportion of children receiving maintenance.

As my hon. Friend the Member for Edinburgh East said, the DWP’s early iterations of the purpose of the HSSF innovation fund gave two key objectives: increasing the number of children who benefit from child maintenance arrangements, by reducing conflict and improving collaboration between separated and separating parents; and testing a wider range of interventions to understand what is effective in encouraging such collaboration and reducing such conflict. However, in later iterations, the object of increasing the number of children to benefit from the arrangements has disappeared.

I can understand that the 17 HSSF innovation pilots differ greatly with respect to the groups that they deal with and the approach that they take; but surely a simple, measurable way to test their success and compare them would be to assess whether something, at least, is being paid towards the cost of raising children by the parent who is not the one with care. Hon. Members have acknowledged that ensuring the flow of maintenance to separated families is one of the best forms of support that can be established. The hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon) was right to highlight the pressures put on family relationships by poverty. It is right that the arrangements that we are discussing should be aimed at reducing that poverty.

NatCen Social Research and Gingerbread say that regular child maintenance can lift one in five one-parent families out of poverty. Those families are at a particularly high risk of poverty, and escaping poverty is the route to a host of other improved socio-economic outcomes for families and their children. However, although it is early days, the introduction of application fees this June, under the new scheme, seems already to be having an effect. In May, before they were introduced, there were 9,700 fresh applications to the scheme, but by August the number of fresh applications had dropped by 38% to 6,000. The Government expected a drop of 12%, with 250,000 fewer cases in the statutory scheme by 2018-19; so the rapid fall-off in new cases seems to be well out of line.

Meanwhile, the number of parents contacting the options service who say that they would consider a voluntary arrangement is also falling. According to a recent report by the Public Accounts Committee, the number who say they are considering one is down from 5,540 in August last year, to 3,590 in March 2014. Ministers responded that the phenomenon would be temporary, and that it resulted from the fact that people are now for the first time being required to go through the options gateway. However, the two sets of statistics, showing a decline both in new applications and in the number who think that they will make a family arrangement, are clearly cause for concern. The unavoidable implication must be that some families—perhaps many—will end up with no arrangement at all. That is a worrying prospect. What is more, as has been pointed out this afternoon, the early statistics cannot yet tell us much about parents who intend to make a family arrangement and try to do so, but find that they cannot, or that they cannot sustain it. Will those parents attempt to go on to the statutory scheme, or will they give up at that point?

We will shortly be able to get more information. The Pensions Minister told me in a written answer on 14 October that the Government intend

“to publish the results of the Child Maintenance Options survey by the end of the year.”

I welcome that. The survey is carried out quarterly by the options service and it goes back to callers who telephoned the service in the previous six months or so, to find out what child maintenance arrangements they made, and whether they in fact receive any maintenance. It has its limitations, but it will at least offer some measure of what callers actually did about child maintenance after their call.

Perhaps I can push the Minister for a little more information. Is it the intention to publish the options quarterly surveys of caller outcomes on a continuing basis, rather than as a one-off? What continuing tracking of parents will there be, with respect to their arrangements and the flow of maintenance after the first six months? If we are serious about improving outcomes for children, we need to know not just what families agree or do at first, but what maintenance actually flows and continues to be paid regularly. When exactly does the Minister expect the Government to publish the first results?

On the question of the pilots, I recognise that the Government want parents to reach their own arrangements wherever possible, and in the past Ministers have said that 51% of parents with care and 74% of non-resident parents said they would make a family arrangement if they had the help and support of an expert and impartial adviser. I assume that that is, in part, exactly what the HSSF initiatives are intended to provide. However, we must also remember the figures given to Members by Gingerbread and Families Need Fathers, which have been mentioned this afternoon: 13% of parents with care and 14% of non-resident parents say that their relationship with the other parent is not at all friendly; and 42% of parents with care and 41% of non-resident parents say they have no contact with the other parent at all. It would take a heroic effort for those parents to make private arrangements, and I fear that the HSSF will fall well short of what will be required.

In cases where there is no contact at all, or where there is considerable hostility between the parents, it will be particularly difficult and challenging to reach private arrangements, and will need specialist and specific support. Yet most of the pilots appear to have been quite generic. As my hon. Friend the Member for Edinburgh East pointed out, only the most recent, quite small-scale pilots have focused on those whose relationships might be seen as the most intractable, or those who have been separated for a long time. My hon. Friend also pointed out other difficulties with and deficiencies in the pilots. Some began late. We should bear in mind that they are short term, so a late start has a significant bearing on their impact. Some are offered by only a small number of organisations. Those are, as my hon. Friend said, highly respected, but none the less with only a small number of charities and other bodies engaged in the pilots, there must be some concerns about coverage. As she highlighted, use of the Sorting out Separation online application has been at a level well below what Ministers expected; just 9,132 unique users had clicked through to a signposting action by January this year, whereas the Government said that there would be 260,000 users in year one.

As my hon. Friend the Member for Makerfield (Yvonne Fovargue) pointed out, there were plans to strengthen co-ordination of local face-to-face services by identifying and utilising touch points that parents have contact with, providing information and links, appointing regional co-ordinators to develop regional networks of contacts, recruiting and training advocates to promote collaborative parenting across delivery organisations and promoting quality mark use, but those pilots have been dropped from the scheme. It is not clear why, especially when we think of those parents with more difficult or long-standing separations who may need highly skilled and longer interventions that that local face-to-face support could best provide. Perhaps the Minister will explain the rationale for dropping that initiative.

There are questions about the impact of the kitemark. It is welcome, but we must know how widely it is used or recognised, and what improvements in service it has helped to bring about. I understand that 35 organisations have been awarded the kitemark, but there is little evidence that parents are aware of its significance and little effort has been made to communicate that to them.

The innovation fund that the Government have set aside has been underspent. With little time left to complete the pilots, it would be useful if the Minister could explain why, and whether they intend to get the rest of the money out of the door before the pilots are due to conclude and to be evaluated in spring 2015. Meanwhile, very little information has been published about parents’ participation in the 17 projects financed under the innovation fund, nor have details been made public of the evaluation process to assess what works in assisting parents to collaborate. Will the Minister say more about that? Who will carry out the evaluation and what will be the criteria for success?

Most disturbingly—colleagues highlighted this—no commitments have been given to scale up the lessons learned from these projects of what works and can be implemented on the scale necessary throughout the country, yet we are now heading into the period when not only new applications but thousands of case closures from the legacy systems will be coming into the new scheme. In truth, the HSSF initiative is way too limited an offer for the almost 2 million parents who will be steered towards making their own child maintenance arrangements over the next three years.

[Pamela Nash]

On the limited offer from HSSF, does my hon. Friend share my concern about couples who have been separated for a long time? It seems that many of the pilots are aimed at those who are separating imminently or have done so recently. Figures from the Department for Work and Pensions have shown that 70% of couples who are using child support allowance have been separated for more than five years.

[Kate Green]

I share my hon. Friend’s concern and I find it puzzling that it was so late in the organisation of the pilots that we began to see efforts to address that specific and challenging group of separated parents. It is hard to imagine how people would be able to make a private arrangement easily with someone with whom they have had no contact or only hostile contact for a long time. I am puzzled at the lack of attention, given the effort that has been put in to, for example, planning the transfer of the legacy cases. It would be helpful if the Minister could say whether the Government intend to offer more support or different support to couples who have had a long period of separation and little or no contact with each other.

Funding for the HSSF pilots ends in March 2015, whereas the CSA legacy cases closure programme runs between 2014-15 to 2017-18. Will the Minister say whether there are any plans to extend HSSF funding to cover the period of CSA case closure? Can she tell us now what financial resources will be made available post-March 2015 to support the HSSF initiative? What funding plans, if any, are in place to implement the lessons learned from the 17 HSSF innovation fund pilots on a wider scale when they have been evaluated? Without decent answers to these questions, we cannot avoid the conclusion that the HSSF initiative, with its pathetic budget of £20 million over three years, has been intended only as window dressing for the scheme.

In scaling up to meet the level of real need, those 17 projects come nowhere close. How can the Government claim to be serious about the HSSF programme when the £10 million awarded to 17 projects is expected to help at best only around 24,000 families face to face plus around 270,000 online while around 300,000 couples separate every year, and around 1 million CSA cases face closure over the next three years? If the Government are to succeed in reducing use of the statutory maintenance service and at the same time enable more parents to collaborate in fixing and paying their own child maintenance, the success of the HSSF initiative is fundamental. Today’s debate raises big questions about whether it is up to the task.