Draft Child Support (Management of Payments and arrears and fees) (Amendment) Regulations 2023

Siobhan Baillie Excerpts

Tuesday 16th January 2024 General Committees

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Work and Pensions (Paul Maynard)]

I beg to move.

That the Committee has considered the draft Child Support (Management of Payments and Arrears and Fees) (Amendment) Regulations 2023.

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mrs Latham, and I am pleased to introduce this statutory instrument, which, subject to approval, will help more families to access vital support through the Child Maintenance Service. It will also ensure that efforts and resources can be focused on taking action to collect unpaid arrears in those cases that will make the biggest difference to children.

The draft regulations are intended to further improve access to the Child Maintenance Service for all families, and to ensure that it runs effectively to focus on getting more money to children. First, to improve access, the regulations remove the £20 application fee to access the Child Maintenance Service. The fee was introduced in 2014 to encourage parents to come to their own collaborative family-based maintenance arrangements, rather than go down the statutory route by default. Evidence published by the Department for Work and Pensions as part of an evaluation of the fee and its impact shows that the £20 fee is not a significant factor for parents when making decisions about their child maintenance arrangements.

However, the evaluation found that families on lower incomes, whom we know disproportionately experience conflict and therefore are often in need of support, can find the application fee a financial barrier to accessing the service. It is important to highlight that around 54% of all applicants already pay no fee because of existing waivers, such as those for victims of domestic abuse and those aged under 19. Therefore, it is sensible to remove the application fee completely for all, ensuring that those most in need can get support more easily.

The regulations will also ensure that the service can more efficiently focus resources on getting larger, more recoverable unpaid payments flowing to children. To be clear, we continue to come down on parents who refuse to pay child maintenance and fail to take responsibility for their children. We do so using a range of enforcement powers to collect unpaid amounts. However, we are taking a pragmatic approach in these regulations by bringing forward powers to write off minimal amounts of £7 or less in a small number of inactive cases that would have been closed were it not for small outstanding balances.

We are introducing that measure for two reasons. First, keeping such cases open requires considerable resource, and taking action to recover such small amounts often costs more than the value of the debt. The cost of leaving such cases open could increase for decades, with no greater chance of money being paid to receiving parents. We need to ensure that taxpayers’ money, as well as caseworker time and effort, is directed effectively, for example by focusing action against parents who owe significantly larger sums and where the impact on children missing out on money is greater. Secondly, given that we close cases only when we have stopped calculating child maintenance payments, it is likely that such cases will no longer be needed. That could be because the child has become an adult, the parents have reconciled, or the absent parent has sadly passed away. It therefore makes sense to close these cases, not least for the certainty and clarity it provides for families.

[Siobhan Baillie (Stroud) (Con)]

I have just been before the Backbench Business Committee with the right hon. Member for East Ham (Sir Stephen Timms) to ask for a debate on child maintenance, so if we get our way, the Minister will hopefully be talking about this again. I see that the proposals affect only 2,800 cases, and both measures seem sensible, but every single MP gets many cases about the service, response times, or things being lost. How will the Department and the Government make sure that even this small change does not send the message that they are not interested in such cases or in ensuring that arrears are paid to families?

[Paul Maynard]

I very much look forward to the next debate that comes my way. I am slightly trepidatious, because this is not my policy area, but it is a good chance for me to learn a bit more and understand it better. My hon. Friend is quite right that we all get many such pieces of constituency casework, which shows the importance of getting this right. I can talk at much greater length about what we are doing, so I look forward to the debate.

The full details of the criteria permitting a debt to be written off are set out in the regulations. They include the maintenance calculations having ceased, and no payments having been made in the previous three months. In addition, the Child Support Act 1991 provides that for write-off powers to be exercised, we must be satisfied that it would be unfair or otherwise inappropriate to enforce liability in respect of the debt.

The changes build on a number of improvements that we have already made, and they are among the first in a wave of measures that we plan to bring forward to ensure that the service is more accessible, simpler and speedier, and ultimately gets more money to more children more quickly.

The measures represent proportionate, common-sense changes that will further improve the Child Maintenance Service. They are good for parents, good for the taxpayer and, most importantly, good for children. I hope that colleagues will join me in supporting them.