Child Maintenance Service

Debate between Munira Wilson and Siobhan Baillie

Tuesday 27th February 2024 Westminster Hall

[Siobhan Baillie (Stroud) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Charles. I give my full support to the right hon. Member for East Ham (Sir Stephen Timms) and the Committee, and everything he asks for today. He had the foresight to bring this matter forward after the publication of the NAO report, and is smart enough to follow up and start poking the Government again, to ensure that we can get some changes. This is a serious issue that everybody up and down the country experiences in their postbags.

I am grateful to colleagues for being so kind about the Bill which I introduced. I am committed to changing the law and improving enforcement, but I must give credit to my right hon. Friend the Member for East Surrey (Claire Coutinho), who initially introduced the Bill but was then made a Minister, and to the Government for their support under the direction of my right hon. Friend the Member for Suffolk Coastal (Dr Coffey). Having Government support always makes it easier when trying to force through change. In that respect, it is a big team effort.

I care so much about the CMS because of my work as a family lawyer and because of personal family experience. My dad still stares off into the middle distance when he talks of his experience of the Child Support Agency back in the day, because it was a disaster. The service goes far beyond the impact of putting money in people’s pockets, important as that is, and as much as we are right to focus on the poverty of children. It affects every single child of every demographic caught up in the difficulties of separating parents. If the system does not work for them, parents often have an impact on their children. They do not mean to; it just happens. If a parent has had to spend a whole week fighting with the CMS on trying to get a calculation, and then there is the handover, the kid is caught in the middle of that frosty handover—or worse, if there is shouting and frustration. I cannot emphasise enough the need to get the system working. As colleagues have said, getting it right early on and making early interventions deters others and changes the lives of families.

I want to say a little bit about dads. They really feel under attack whenever we talk about changing the Child Maintenance Service. It is often dads in my surgery who are in tears, because they care deeply about their children. They often have residence of their children and shared care, but the system does not recognise that or has ignored a court order. The round robins and the constant nightmare with correspondence is very damaging, and sadly it is often dads who are taking their own lives or pointing to problems with the CMS.

It is right to recognise that 93% of paying parents in the system are dads. However, we cannot ignore the fact that non-paying parents include dads, and that the liability orders that were sought in the past were sought against dads. I ask all the dads listening to this, when they hear of the push for curfew orders, societal changes and so on, to stay angry. They should not necessarily stay angry with MPs in this room, because they will just join a long list of people who are angry with us, but rather stay angry with the dads who are letting down their kids and not paying, because they poison the well for the good dads who are trying their best.

One of my constituents said that he feels—and colleagues have said this too—that there is an institutional bias in favour of the receiving parent. Even when it is proven that a receiving parent is not being honest or true, the burden of proof is often on the paying parent, and that is causing a huge amount of stress.

I am trying to calculate how much time I have left to speak. In the complex cases that we are trying to fix by tightening up enforcement, parents are seeing the lifestyle of non-paying parents far outstripping their own. The non-paying parents are going abroad and having a lovely time with their new families, but the process of taking evidence of that to the CMS is falling down. A mum wrote to me saying that she was experiencing considerable stress. She was not receiving any money. She was working between 40 and 50 hours a week just to keep her kids clothed, and that meant, because of her work ethic, that she did not qualify for any benefits. However, she could see the non-paying parent treating himself to several luxurious holidays a year to faraway shores. That is hugely detrimental to the children in that family, and we have got—

[Munira Wilson (Twickenham) (LD)]

On the hon. Lady’s point about complex cases, some of the most egregious cases which I and other hon. Members have seen in our surgeries involve the paying parent concealing income because they are self-employed, so they are not paying what is owed. One mother came to me who is owed £18,000 in arrears, and I met another who has been fighting for six years for £22,000- worth of payments. The way in which arrears are treated is different from live cases, where a small amount being paid is accepted. Does the hon. Lady agree that we need a full review of how those complex cases are dealt with and reform of the CMS?

[Siobhan Baillie]

One of the biggest issues is that people’s lives are complex—families are complex and blended. We have wonderful ways of living, which must be reflected in how CMS caseworkers are trained, but we also need a bespoke approach to each case, because this is incredibly difficult. I give credit to the CMS; I am always impressed by it and I thoroughly enjoyed working with it to try to make changes, as well as with Lord Younger and Baroness Stedman-Scott, who are amazing parliamentarians who are working really hard.

The National Audit Office says that we are heading for £1 billion-worth of arrears by 2030. When the Child Support Agency had a controlled explosion from 2014 to 2018, the figures were not anywhere near that. The reality of the long wait for decisions, a lack of clarity about maintenance paid, poor communication, unclear calculations, poor service and bad handling is poisoning the well for all families. I urge the Minister to take that strong message back to the Department.