Child Maintenance Service

Kieran Mullan Excerpts

Tuesday 27th February 2024 Westminster Hall

[Dr Kieran Mullan (Crewe and Nantwich) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Charles. I thank the right hon. Member for East Ham (Sir Stephen Timms) for securing a debate on this topic, on which I have campaigned consistently during my time as an MP. I campaign on this issue because I feel strongly that there is a pure moral obligation and benefit to hard-working taxpayers of cracking down on delinquent parents.

I have said before and I will say again that having children, then not contributing to the cost of raising them is morally reprehensible. I certainly think it is worse than shoplifting, fraud, dropping litter, selling counterfeit goods and a whole range of other things for which individuals can and do regularly face much tougher sanctions. This is not about some idealised view of families or saying that families should be one size fits all; it is about saying that whatever the relationship between parents, both maintain a moral obligation to provide for their children. Recently, children have seen a win with the successful passage of the Child Support (Enforcement) Act 2023. I pay tribute to my hon. Friend the Member for Stroud (Siobhan Baillie) for introducing the Act, and I fully support its aims. We have had the necessary consultations ahead of enactment and, like others, I would welcome an update from the Minister on when we can expect to see the powers being used, because they are very much needed.

According to Gingerbread, total arrears sit at £547.9 million. Imagine the positive impact we could have had on children had that money been paid. The non-payment of maintenance is a key driver of child poverty. If all maintenance due was paid, 60% of children of single parents who are not benefiting from payments would be lifted out of poverty. Let us be clear that in many respects taxpayers pick up the bill indirectly. Although I praise these advances, I worry that they will not be enough, and represent a partial acceptance of an unacceptable status quo, in particular for those parents who do not earn, or earn very little, when they could reasonably have expected to earn more.

This is where we need one of two fundamental rethinks. When it comes to out-of-work benefit payments, we expect recipients to make an effort to find work and earn more, because they have a moral obligation to the rest of us who pay for their benefits. Surely, the obligation to earn to care for one’s children is even greater. We should subject parents to the same reasonable expectations to find work and earn more as we do for those who claim benefits.

To enforce that and other expectations, I continue to ask the Government to make use of the home curfew powers available. The use of already established but unused powers to impose a home curfew, I believe, would have a positive impact on those who shy away from their parental financial duties. Indeed, spending six months with no social life would certainly provide time to reassess responsibilities and allow people to be made an example of.

That brings me to the second fundamental rethink. The current system ignores the moral aspect of this debt. This is not a commercial debt; people should be punished for not providing when they reasonably could. At the moment, the system simply asks them to start paying money again and, if they do that, everything falls away. There is no punishment for their moral failure to make an effort to pay, when they could, or for deliberately seeking to avoid paying. We need to create moral hazard for individuals to behave in that way.

A home curfew has the added benefit of providing time for a parent to go out to work, so arguments about punishments hampering earnings, particularly custody, fall away. Of course, these powers should not be the first port of call. Cases must have a clear evidence base that a parent has actively made attempts to deny sharing money, or made no effort over a long period of time to find work and increase earnings. I am also clear, for those who are concerned about this and write to me when I raise it, that custody and benefit arrangements are separate.

I recognise that there are parents who want to pay, do pay, and do not get access to their children. That is wrong and I encourage all of them to use the courts to secure the access to which they are legally entitled. That does not mean that someone should not pay in the meantime. If there is a genuine dispute about maintenance payments, I can understand why these cases arise, but I question the priorities of a parent who only wants to pay maintenance for their child when they have custody. Surely, payment of maintenance should come first, and custody rights should be pursued separately.

I will finish by asking the Minister to explain why we have again moved away from using home curfews, and ask him to reconsider that, or at least commit to doing so, if these newly enacted powers fail to bring down the maintenance backlog, which, unfortunately, I am confident they will not. Children deserve nothing less, and wider society should rely on us to uphold these basic moral standards.

--- Later in debate ---

[Peter Grant (Glenrothes) (SNP)]

Thank you very much, Sir Charles, for calling me to speak; I am grateful for the chance to begin summing up in this debate.

First, I commend the right hon. Member for East Ham (Sir Stephen Timms), the Chair of the Select Committee, for securing this debate. I thank him and other Members of that Committee for giving me the chance to attend, as a guest, some of the hearings when they have had the Child Maintenance Service before them. Also, I want to give the right hon. Gentleman more than the usual token 20 or 30 seconds at the end of the debate to sum up, so I will try to keep within the 10 minutes I have; those who know me will know what a struggle that will be, but I will do my best.

I think this is the third time I have participated in a Westminster Hall debate on the Child Maintenance Service and I am again struck today by the fact that there has been very little disagreement in the Chamber; everybody accepts that the CMS is not working, that the time for talking about changing it is long past and that we need to start seriously changing it.

It was very noticeable in this debate today that the overwhelming majority of contributions have come from the Minister’s own party, with two of them from people who have been there with ministerial responsibility: the right hon. Members for Romsey and Southampton North (Caroline Nokes) and for Suffolk Coastal (Dr Coffey).

Incidentally, while the right hon. Member for Romsey and Southampton North was speaking, I made a quick check and found that, since she moved from the Department for Work and Pensions in 2017, we are now on our fifth Minister with responsibility for child maintenance. Maybe that partly explains why it has taken so long to get anywhere. There are obviously reasons why there have been so many Cabinet changes in that time, but I think the Child Maintenance Service is far too important to be one of the things that gets added to the portfolio of someone who stays in post for six months before they get moved on, because it is complex and, if a Minister is in post for only a year, they will not get the time to get on top of the service and drive forward significant changes.

As I have said, this is a system that is simply not fit for purpose. I do not think that we can beat around the bush and look for minor changes; we need a complete overhaul and review, starting from a blank sheet of paper and redesigning the whole thing.

To illustrate that point, I will ask a question. If somebody came in who did not know what the Child Maintenance Service was for and just looked at what it did, would they ever be able to work out what its purpose is? If they did, I will guarantee that they would not conclude that its main purpose was to make sure that no child had to live in poverty simply because of the family circumstances that their parents have found themselves in. If we accept that aim as a valid purpose for the Child Maintenance Service, we begin to understand just how far away from hitting that target we are just now.

Depending on what figures people believe, the United Kingdom is probably the fifth or sixth wealthiest economy in the world, yet 4.2 million children in the UK live in poverty, according to the Child Poverty Action Group. Again, we can argue about the exact number of children in poverty, but we cannot argue that the number of children living in poverty in an economy with so much money spilling around in some places is simply not acceptable. By fixing the Child Maintenance Service, we can certainly reduce the number of children living in poverty, and in such a way that the people who pay for it are the people who should have been paying for it all along. The parents have had the children, but for one reason or another are simply not meeting their responsibilities to pay financial support for their upbringing.

One of the previous speakers—the hon. Member for Amber Valley (Nigel Mills), I think—talked about the fact that debt owed to the Child Maintenance Service is not seen as important or as such a high priority for collection as debt owed to the Government. Again, that is simply wrong. Why do we not have a system in which the DWP pays all the child maintenance due, and then the DWP chases the people who are fiddling the figures or trying to hide and not pay the money? I can guarantee that if the DWP were chasing an absent parent for the money, they would not be living on a fancy yacht in the Bahamas or in the Mediterranean, as mentioned by the hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon). If they were doing that, but the money was owed to the Government, they certainly would not be posting on Facebook to boast about how much money they had or how much they were able to hide.

[Dr Mullan]

I do not know whether the hon. Gentleman was able to listen to my points about moral hazard, but does he agree that his proposal for the taxpayer to pick up directly the payments of absent parents who are not paying would double the impact of saying, “You don’t have responsibility. The taxpayer will step in directly and pay it for you.”?

[Peter Grant]

If the hon. Gentleman had listened to what I was saying, he would realise that that is exactly what I am not saying. I am saying that the full force of collection and enforcement that is in the hands of His Majesty’s Revenue and Customs or DWP should be brought to bear not only on those who refuse to pay what they are assessed as being due to pay, but on those who are lying, committing fraud and stealing from their own children. Ultimately, they would still be stealing from their own children, but HMRC has powers to enforce in a way that a single parent does not have. That is what I am saying. It is not a simple solution, but I think it would make a significant difference. As has been mentioned, the DWP’s own figures reckon that since the Child Maintenance Service was set up, £590 million of debt has not been collected. That does not include the undetected fraud or the under-declaration of income, assets and so on.

Something else that I always find concerning about the CMS is that it does not seem to have any curiosity about a parent who fights and fights to get a settlement but then just disappears off the system and gives up. In Child Maintenance Service cases I have dealt with, I have found that probably the single biggest outcome is that the parent with responsibility for bringing up the children simply gives up in frustration, deciding that it is better for them just to get on with their life and to struggle through—very often in or near poverty—because they can no longer cope with the stress of dealing with the Child Maintenance Service. That is a shocking indictment of any Government service, in particular one whose only point, whose only reason to exist, is to make lives better for vulnerable young children.

I have often noticed that, when speaking to parents, the paying partner always talks about how much they are having to pay to their ex-partner. They often do not see it as paying for the upkeep of their children. Something about the language we use here, we need to look at. Something raised by one of my constituents at a roundtable held by Fife Gingerbread, which I hope the Department has picked up and started to act on, is that CMS letters get addressed to the parent—the parent’s name is on it—and it does not say “To the parent of” with the name of the child, which would be a simple way of making it clear that this is about the children.

There will often be bad will between two partners who have split up. Whether they split up amicably or acrimoniously, once they start disagreeing about money, it is likely to become quite a bit more acrimonious. The children, however, should never be made to suffer as a result.

I mentioned Fife Gingerbread. I again need to commend the outstanding work that it has done, and not just within the boundaries of Fife. It is one of the organisations that has influenced the way in which the Child Maintenance Service now operates. On the scrapping of the £20 fee for being able to claim child maintenance, for example, I am convinced that Fife Gingerbread is one of the organisations that can claim part of the credit for having achieved that, as well as a number of other changes that we are seeing.

We have had reference to the fact that IT systems are not fit for purpose. This is the 21st century—we are almost a quarter of the way into the century—and we are using systems that are 40 or 50 years out of date. The Chair of the Select Committee, the right hon. Member for East Ham, and other members of the Work and Pensions Committee and of the Public Accounts Committee will remember only too well what happened to the payment of state pensions when the Department carried on using systems that were no longer fit for purpose. We could be heading for an equally massive injustice in the assessment, payment and collection of child maintenance if we do not get those systems sorted out. As the hon. Member for Amber Valley said, it should not take three or four months for somebody to be told why the assessment is the number that it is. In some of the queries to HMRC, when people are assessed on self-assessment, they could go online, and sitting in front of them would be exactly why HMRC had assessed them for that amount.

The final thing is that one way to reduce the need for child maintenance is for Governments to take other action on children in poverty. This Government could undertake actions that have already been shown to be successful by the Scottish Government. There is the child payment, which has lifted about 50,000 children in Scotland out of poverty; if we do that down here, we are talking about half a million children being lifted out of poverty. Actions taken by the Scottish Government are estimated to reduce the cost of bringing up a child by somewhere in the region of £25,000 to £26,000 during their childhood. Policies similar to those would reduce the demands on child maintenance, reducing the need either for children to live in poverty or for their parents to almost literally come to blows arguing over who should care for their child.

I entirely agree that nobody should feel that they can just leave their children to be the responsibility of someone else. I find it interesting that financial neglect, which is what we are talking about here, is treated differently from any other forms of neglect. If a parent neglects their child in any other way, we do not just stand back and leave the parents to sort it out. If a parent is deliberately neglecting their children financially, they cannot be allowed to get away with it. I do not have confidence that the existing Child Maintenance Service will ever be able to address that, which is why we need to design an entirely new service fit for the 21st century that recognises the wide variety of circumstances that people live in today.

--- Later in debate ---

[Alison McGovern (Wirral South) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Sir Charles. I thank all colleagues who have contributed, in particular the Chair of the Select Committee, my right hon. Friend the Member for East Ham (Sir Stephen Timms), for bringing forward the debate. As we heard from all the serious questions asked, it is important.

The Minister has quite a number of important questions to answer, so I will try to be swift. It is clear from this debate that on both sides of the House we all want parents to meet their responsibilities and pay what their child needs—no ifs, no buts; just get it done. We know from Gingerbread, which was mentioned by many hon. Members, that 60% of children of single parents not benefiting from child maintenance could be lifted out of poverty if that support were paid in full. That is why we want to get it sorted. The current situation is just not acceptable, which is why it was good—if a little tardy—that recently we the Government finally removed the fee for the service, after many people had warned for a number of years that it would remove its effectiveness.

Listening to colleagues, it strikes me that it would be helpful if the Government could provide a timeline or working update to help colleagues to know which improvements to CMS they are making and the status of those improvements. There are areas where the Government could do that and help us: on issues relating to domestic abuse, to customer service—I think particularly of the contribution made by the hon. Member for Amber Valley (Nigel Mills) about the complexity of calculations; it cannot be beyond us to have clarity and be able to inform citizens of the information that the Government have on their behalf—and to enforcement. Members have made it absolutely clear how long we have been trying to get enforcement improved, and having a working update from the Government on where we are with that would really help colleagues. I want the Minister to consider that.

When the Minister and I last met across Dispatch Boxes, I had some questions about research undertaken by the Government. The Minister was kind enough to write to me on 21 February to say that Ipsos is commissioned currently to research direct pay customers. That is really helpful, because we really need to understand what is going on for parents. Can he say more about when that will be published? That would be really useful.

In the letter to me, the Minister also mentioned a particular tool that the DWP has developed, which I think gives us some hope in this area. Members have rightly expressed frustration and distress from listening to cases involving people who have had to deal with having a calculation that they knew was wrong. I am thinking of the person that the Chair of the Select Committee mentioned at the beginning of his speech—the dad who had lost a son. These are really heartbreaking cases.

However, I think that there is some hope in the letter that the Minister sent to me where he mentioned the “Get help arranging child maintenance” tool that had been developed for unbiased advice and support and designed to be convenient for parents and to support people into the most suitable arrangements for their circumstances. I would like to ask the Minister what lessons the DWP has drawn from the development of that tool. From listening to the contributions of colleagues, it strikes me that if we could have a focus also on early advice, help and support so that people knew, at the very distressing time of relationship breakdown, what the best steps were for them, that would be hopeful and point to a better direction, so I would be grateful if the Minister could say what lessons the DWP is drawing from the development of the tool.

Sir Charles, I said that I was going to be swift and I will be. I will sum up by making three brief points that I think we can all agree with.

[Dr Mullan]

There could be a change of Government by the end of the year. I welcome the warm words, and the hon. Member may go on to describe specific policy pledges, but I would like to hear specific policy goals that her party has in mind. For example, do you support the introduction of home curfews? Rather than just speaking warm words, what will you actually do differently should you end up in government?

[Sir Charles Walker (in the Chair)]

Order. Can we not use the word “you” in the Chamber when referring to another Member?

[Dr Mullan]

My apologies, Sir Charles.

[Alison McGovern]

Thank you, Sir Charles, and I thank the hon. Gentleman for his intervention. I will just say to him that not a single vote in an election has been cast yet.

[Dr Mullan]

I said “could”.