Oral Answers to Questions

Malcolm Wicks Excerpts

Monday 18th October 2010 Commons Chamber

[Maria Miller]

I thank my hon. Friend for that question. She is absolutely right that this data can help particularly to ensure that individuals pay the money they are due to pay. Indeed, we will consider that under the planned revisions to the CSA’s IT system. I should like to reassure her that the Child Maintenance and Enforcement Commission is already putting in place a number of other measures to ensure that we increase enforcement actions. Indeed, as a result of those measures we have seen a significant increase in enforcement actions in the past 12 months.

[Malcolm Wicks (Croydon North) (Lab)]

Given that a significant cause of childhood deprivation is the failure of so-called absent parents—usually fathers, but sometimes mothers—to pay for their own children, and given that, to be blunt, both previous Governments, despite good efforts, found this a difficult nut to crack, will the Minister consider new measures to ensure that we do not just go after the easy targets, such as those on salaries and in the public services, but find new ways of getting to fathers, some of them serial fathers, who are determined to avoid paying for their own children and expect other mums and dads called taxpayers to do their job for them?