Child Support Agency

Robert Buckland Excerpts

Wednesday 11th July 2012 Westminster Hall

[Mr Robert Buckland (South Swindon) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Weir. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Loughborough (Nicky Morgan) on securing the debate. I will not repeat the excellent points made by the speakers so far, but will simply use a couple of examples from my casework to illustrate two recurrent problems from which the CSA suffers and which need to be addressed as part of the reform process, as we move to 2013 and that all-important change.

More than 4,000 families in Swindon use the CSA to recover maintenance payments. In my constituency, £6.9 million is owed in arrears—the highest figure in the south-west—so the number of parents, either with care or non-resident, who come to me, as a last hope in many cases, because of the problems they are experiencing, is no surprise. I will use two examples: one of a non-resident parent and one of a parent with care.

First, Mr D, the non-resident parent, was on tour with the Army in Afghanistan for six months. Prior to his tour of duty, he informed the CSA that it meant that he would be away and therefore would technically not be a shared carer, because he would see the children for fewer than the required 52 days. By way of a court order, he has the children for approx 70 days a year with split holiday time. He told the CSA, went on his tour of duty and came back to find that the CSA had finally acted and presented him with a large bill for arrears.

That is not acceptable. The least courtesy we can offer to serving members of the armed forces is to deal promptly when they provide information to the CSA, rather than reward them with a massive bill on their return. Mr D accepts that his tour of duty means a reduction in shared care and that consequences follow, but really, more must be done to improve the quality of how we deal with cases such as his. I do not believe that he and many others should be penalised in that way for serving and representing their country. Active service should be taken into consideration when such issues are being determined.

There is a broad-brush approach that does not help anyone. I find it hard to believe that no mechanism can be found to deal more sensitively with payment changes for serving military personnel. This is an ongoing problem, not just for Mr D but for countless serving military personnel, because they never know when they might be redeployed. I urge the Minister to consider a more flexible approach in those circumstances, so that we can do better by our armed forces. I have already raised Mr D’s case with the Minister and I am grateful to her for corresponding with me about it. Today I make a heartfelt plea, not just on Mr D’s behalf, but on behalf of thousands in the same position.

My second example illustrates what I regard as a poor use of enforcement powers. Miss C is a parent with care of a young child. She first contacted the CSA in 2006, but is yet to receive any money. She has had liability orders and has had the non-resident parent taken to court on two occasions, but still she has received nothing. Her bitter experience has taught her that the powers available to the CSA are not being used strongly enough. Those powers include the removal of driving licences and, yes, imprisonment. At the moment the maximum sentence for non-payment is six weeks, but there are clearly cases where that is an insufficient deterrent and maximum term, and it seems the courts are slow to remove driving licences or impose such sentences. There must be stricter penalties for evading responsibilities. More people are being imprisoned for animal cruelty—itself a serious offence—than for non-payment of child maintenance.

Miss C’s former partner is of no fixed abode, as in the example cited by my hon. Friend the Member for South East Cornwall (Sheryll Murray), and works in what I shall describe as an irregular way, for cash payment. I understand that it is proving very difficult for the CSA to trace and track activities of that nature, but other powers are available in such circumstances and they are not being adequately used. I urge that a different approach be taken with persistent non-compliance of this nature—we are talking about six years. There should be more automatic powers available to the successor body to the CSA to freeze and remove money from bank accounts, where available, and to impose restrictions on holding passports and driving licences, without the need for costly and cumbersome court proceedings.

In the years since its creation, the CSA has become an organisation that, despite the best efforts of many of its employees, is still failing far too many parents with care and non-resident parents. I urge the Minister to do everything she can to ensure that the reforms address some of the issues raised today.