Women’s State Pension Age
Siobhan Baillie Excerpts(8 months, 3 weeks ago)
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Mel Stride
I was merely pointing out the fact that we stand four-square behind pensioners across the United Kingdom to support them. That is why under this Government there are 200,000 fewer pensioners in poverty, after housing costs, than there were in 2010.
Siobhan Baillie (Stroud) (Con)
WASPI women across my Stroud constituency have campaigned consistently and constructively. I have grown very fond of them as we have discussed the subject over the years. As the Secretary of State knows, at the heart of the issue are women saying that they were left unable to plan or that their plans for the future were scuppered, so the focus should be on laying out a timetable as soon as possible. The issue of compensation is key to many of these women, who will have read the report. It is right that the Secretary of State and his Department look through the report in detail, but will he lay out a timetable, tell these women what is and is not possible, and manage their expectations as soon as possible, because they have waited?
Mel Stride
My hon. Friend is a member of the Work and Pensions Committee and I welcome her question. I reassure her that there will be no undue delay. I thank her for recognising that we need to look at these matters with great care. That does not mean coming forward with some of the things that the Scottish National party may wish us to do on a Monday, given that the report landed with us only last Thursday.
Child Maintenance Service
Siobhan Baillie Excerpts(9 months, 3 weeks ago)
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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.
Several hon. Members rose—
Draft Child Support (Management of Payments and arrears and fees) (Amendment) Regulations 2023
Siobhan Baillie Excerpts(11 months ago)
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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.
Oral Answers to Questions
Siobhan Baillie Excerpts(1 year ago)
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Siobhan Baillie (Stroud) (Con)
The Secretary of State for Work and Pensions (Mel Stride)
I had the great pleasure of visiting my hon. Friend’s jobcentre in April. Since then, it has been closed temporarily, I believe, and moved to Gloucester. I am sure there is no connection. [Interruption.] I am really sure, I can reassure the hon. Member for Cambridge (Daniel Zeichner). Of course, it does a fantastic job in matching jobs through work coaches, jobs fairs, recruitment days and an extensive skills offering.
Siobhan Baillie
Work experience is often really hard to nail down—places go to those with friends and family in the sector, and employers are really busy. That is particularly so for small skilled manufacturing businesses in Stroud, so I am working with employability experts Finito to launch a campaign for low-fuss shadowing work experience across the board. We want to allow everybody, young and old, to find out more about weird and wonderful jobs, and to allow employers to assess candidates. Is that something my right hon. Friend is interested in, and will he meet me to discuss it?
Mel Stride
I thank my hon. Friend for the question, and I would be delighted for either me or the relevant Minister to meet her. I know the terrific work she has done, particularly with organisations such as Finito, in getting young people ready for work. Indeed, I believe she set up the all-party parliamentary group on the future of employability. I am very happy to have a meeting.
Mims Davies
I do not want to commit the Secretary of State, but I have a feeling that he will be in Ynys Môn in February. I thank my hon. Friend for the huge amount of work that she does in respect of local jobcentres, and for her work with those employers. I met her just last week to discuss her focus on young people. Her Local Jobs for Local People campaign is a great example of her tireless work for the future of the community in Ynys Môn—so, iechyd da!
Siobhan Baillie (Stroud) (Con)
The Secretary of State for Work and Pensions (Mel Stride)
May I begin by welcoming my new team to the Front Bench? Joining the Under-Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, my hon. Friend the Member for Mid Sussex (Mims Davies), and Lord Younger in the other place are the new Minister for Employment, my hon. Friend the Member for Bury St Edmunds (Jo Churchill), and the Under-Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, my hon. Friend the Member for Blackpool North and Cleveleys (Paul Maynard). I know that they will make a great contribution to the Department. Let me also thank those who have departed, my right hon. Friend the Member for Sevenoaks (Laura Trott) and my hon. Friends the Members for Corby (Tom Pursglove) and for Hexham (Guy Opperman), who have important other duties in Government.
This has been a year of considerable achievement for my Department. We have already heard about the cost of living payments, the support for the most vulnerable, the 6.7% increase in working-age benefits, the 8.5% increase in respect of the triple lock for pensioners, welfare reform, near-record levels of payroll employment and almost historically low levels of unemployment, and rising real wages.
Siobhan Baillie
I welcome the Government’s decision to boost childcare payments for parents on universal credit by almost 50%, which the Work and Pensions Committee pushed for. I have asked the Department to review childcare rules for parents in training and education, but can my right hon. Friend outline the other ways in which the Government are supporting low-income families in Stroud?
Mel Stride
My hon. Friend is being too modest in laying all the progress at the door of the Select Committee, because it was she in particular who pushed for those reforms to childcare within universal credit, and I believe that she was quite rightly name-checked by the Chancellor in his Budget statement. We of course have the back to work plan, the extension of restart, the doubling of universal support, the greatest-ever increase in the national living wage and the reductions in employee national insurance, all of which are there to drive further employment.
Increasing Employment: Training
Siobhan Baillie Excerpts(1 year, 5 months ago)
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Siobhan Baillie (Stroud) (Con)
I have two main points to land. The first is that the best way for someone to get work-ready and improve their life chances is to get a job and progress in the job they have. The second is that we need a clear-eyed look at existing training provision, including the apprenticeship levy, to provide thousands of jobs in small and medium-sized enterprises, which are the backbone of the country. I am thinking particularly of the jobs and businesses in the Stroud district.
Many moons ago, a boss told me that I had bouncebackability. That was a polite and positive way of noting that I get up every time I mess up and fall flat on my face, which is pretty often. That boss changed my life. Being a free school meal kid from a chaotic single-parent family and leaving home at 15 means you basically get written off. The statistics say that you are in trouble, but that does not have to be a given, as my story will testify.
I started work as a secretary. Over time, the firm saw something in me and got me into a training programme. I attended night school and law school at weekends; it took a long time, but I qualified as a solicitor. I had no debt and I had years of experience under my belt. However, I hid all of that for a long time, because I was embarrassed. Most lawyers go to university, and Tony Blair had rammed it into all of us that university was the only way forward. I was wrong to be embarrassed and he was wrong to have such a narrow focus. I did not understand that all my jobs—paper round, supermarket checkout girl, aerobics teacher and spinning instructor, which were all done to pay law school fees—and years at the coalface of work had equivalent value to a degree. I was wrong, and I am happy to admit it, because I have bouncebackability.
The best way to be work-ready and life-ready—to grasp the chances that come across your desk—is to actually go to work. Social mobility is not just about poor kids getting into Oxford; for workless families, a parent holding down any job will improve the social mobility of their children. Becoming a manager or retraining into a second career is social mobility in action. Sadly, however, snobbery about further education and having no degree continues to this day. To see that we need only look at Carol Vorderman’s attack on my right hon. Friend the Member for Plymouth, Moor View (Johnny Mercer) and his wife, where she said in a tweet:
“not a degree in sight…who’d employ them?”.
That is the latest example of nonsense; dismissing a Minister who works tirelessly for the armed forces and veterans for not having gone to university is bad enough, but being deliberately condescending about the lives of millions of people who did not go to university is unforgiveable. I used to admire Carol Vorderman a lot, before she decided to eat so much political hate for breakfast to get social media hits. Now, sadly, I just feel sorry for her.
Thankfully, this Government recognise the quality of life that employment and training can bring, and it is absolutely at the heart of our growth strategy. Despite the global economic turmoil, the UK still has its lowest unemployment since the 1970s, at 3.9%, and the fourth highest employment rate in the G7. I give credit to the Stroud jobcentre and the Department for Work and Pensions team, which the Secretary of State visited. They are doing an incredibly amount locally, taking a bespoke, careful look at how we help people off long-term sick and into jobs.
In The Sun yesterday, Matthew Elliott, the president of the Jobs Foundation, wrote about how securing a full-time salaried job cuts the risk of falling into poverty by 90%. He explained:
“Productive and meaningful employment gives us an opportunity to learn and develop our skills. It allows us to afford a better standard of living…and brings structure and routine which helps mental health and wellbeing.”
At a time when a fifth of people are not confident about their financial position, millions rely on their job. Jobs, training and in-work development are therefore the gold standard. I set up the all-party parliamentary group on the future of employability to explore this issue further after a decade of discussions about education with my friend Ronel Lehmann, who founded Finito, which helps young people get work-ready. The APPG has also been backed by the Institute of the Motor Industry and the Wise Group, which are incredibly helpful in thinking through how we can make people get into jobs and stay in them.
I turn to my second issue: I believe that we need a clear-eyed look at existing training provision to help SMEs and to help people stay in jobs. The Government are stealing a march on creating lifelong learning opportunities. There are a range of training programmes, including skills bootcamps, sector-based work academy programmes —SWAPs—the Multiply programme supporting adult numeracy, and free skills for jobs courses. Returnships are basically all of the above along with apprenticeships, but for people over 50 returning to work or seeking a career change.
However, I have a challenge for the Minister. I do not believe that we need new-fangled policy or legislation. We have everything we need. I do not want any more fancy-pants new schemes; we need to reform the ones we have. We need to accept that good products such as the apprenticeship levy require changing to make them business friendly. We should not scrap them but improve them.
Take returnships, for example. More than 500,000 over-50s have stepped away from the workplace post pandemic, so I completely understand the focus on that age group, but with the rise of technology such as artificial intelligence, it will be people in their 30s and 40s who may need to change employment. Let us tweak that policy and see who else we can help.
So much depends on the efficiency of the apprenticeship levy. I listen carefully to organisations such as the Federation of Small Businesses, to businesses such as Renishaw and BorgWarner in my constituency that have apprentices, and to local companies that desperately want apprentices. Many feel that the system is just not working for them.
I appreciate that this is strictly a Department for Education issue, but it is crucial to employment, so I am grateful that the Minister for Employment will be responding to the debate. Every apprenticeship is a job with bells on, and it so often leads to a long and meaningful career. It is also cheaper to the taxpayer, given that the Government had to write off 44% of student loans in 2021-22.
The DWP and the Treasury are grappling with the issue of economic inactivity and the millions on out-of-work benefits. I respectfully believe that, along with the Department for Education, they need to take a keen interest in the apprenticeship levy and listen to what Stroud district employers, the Association of Colleges and chambers of commerce all over the country are telling us. It cannot be right, as UKHospitality points out, that one of my local pubs cannot transfer its levy to another pub in the same chain, and that the levy will just disappear back into the Treasury if it is not used. We can make changes to make this thing work better for business.
Let me turn to some clever bits. I cannot take credit for them; they came from the brains at Policy Exchange—I recommend the report by Iain Mansfield and Toby Hirst, “Reforming the Apprenticeship Levy”—and from my local college, SGS Stroud, which asked me to cover many of Policy Exchange’s recommendations. Before I come to my recommendations, I will outline a few points for us to have in the back of our brains.
Over the last five years, £4.3 billion has been raised by the levy but then not spent on apprenticeships. A recent report by UCAS and the Sutton Trust found that 430,000 students were interested in apprenticeships but only 5,000 a year are starting degree-equivalent courses. I have a university technical college in my patch, which was started by my predecessor, Neil Carmichael. I went there with Lord Baker. We had its students—young women science, technology, engineering and maths students—up here this week saying that they are desperate for apprenticeships but they cannot find one. These are young people with brilliant minds. We have to get them into the jobs that they want.
We know that learning on the job is attractive to people of all ages. Learning at an older stage in life in an apprenticeship, so that we can earn and learn, is crucial to those of us with families and mortgages who need or want a career change. Yet unfortunately, the total number of apprenticeship starts has gone down to 349,000 in 2021-22, which is significantly below the 393,000 in 2018-19, and lower than the high of 500,000. Therefore, while the quality has definitely gone up, the starts are something that we need to look at, because they matter.
The number of starts in SMEs has fallen by almost 50%, but small employers all over the shop, many of which I speak to locally, want to train up their own workers. As Policy Exchange explains in detail in its report, the requirement to pass English and Maths at level 2, which is a GCSE equivalent, means that somebody can be barred from achieving an apprenticeship qualification in bricklaying, childcare or IT due to a lack of achievement at school, which may have been years or decades ago. We desperately need these workers. I am fighting campaigns about childcare workers, so what is happening at the moment is madness.
Robin Millar (Aberconwy) (Con)
I am very taken by what my hon. Friend is saying about the ordinariness—if such a word exists—of the training needs. In my own constituency, which the Minister has been kind enough to visit, tourism and hospitality are the major employers. I see on an almost daily basis employers in hotels, pubs and restaurants talking about how they are trying to offer employment to the young as a first job, to those in middle age who want something more flexible, to those who are returning to the workforce at an older age, and—I say this as the Minister for Employment is here—increasingly to those who are perhaps on the edges of employment in conventional settings. A little more effort and a bit of help from the Department for Work and Pensions makes them suitable for the work environment. Does my hon. Friend agree that the packages and the help that the Government offer need to be applicable in those very ordinary and routine settings?
Siobhan Baillie
I absolutely do agree, and I welcome the intervention. The reality is that talking about these everyday jobs—jobs that we desperately need in every single one of our constituencies—is key to impressing on the Government why these changes are needed. The bureaucracy and the pain in the neck that come with trying to work through the apprenticeship levy are actually putting off quite a lot of small businesses. They do not have the extra department to do the paperwork for them. However, Policy Exchange and I have some ideas about that.
There are loads of recommendations in the report, but I have picked out a few that would really push forward on this. The first would be to transform the levy into a growth and skills levy. That would allow employers to spend up to 25% of funds on high-quality employer-relevant skills training, including shorter and more flexible courses. On my hon. Friend’s point, this is about flexibility for everyday businesses and everyday people.
Secondly, we want to see a £3,000 incentive for every young apprentice trained by an SME to help support smaller businesses with off-the-job training costs. We also think that there need to be course finishing bonuses to make sure that we encourage learners to go all the way through. The adult learning budget is a fraction of the tertiary education budget, so I would like to see some funding made available for that. I would view it as levelling up skills and jobs around the country.
Thirdly, we need to create SME roles and hubs at colleges and growth hubs to support SMEs in dealing with the bureaucracy and the recruitment of apprentices. We have regional schools commissioners, so why not a regional apprenticeship facilitator—an RAF? I am sure the actual RAF will have something to say about that, but why can we not provide these regional support systems?
Fourthly, we could abolish the apprenticeship minimum wage, with all apprentices to be paid the national minimum wage for their age. I recognise that that is a Treasury matter and that we are not flush with money in this country—nor indeed is any country in the world right now—but in financially constraining times youngsters will choose a job in a supermarket that pays more than an apprenticeship. That is not only because they need the cash, but because apprenticeships are hard graft. We need to reward them—it will help all of us. I would also like to see the immigration shortage occupations list linked to skills training. Employers should be able to use the levy to fund qualifications to help them to train up local talent instead of being forced to rely on immigration.
I would like to know what the Minister, with his employment hat on, thinks of those proposals. Will he tell us about what DWP is doing to use employment to improve the life chances of people of all ages, and to make the UK’s existing training provision work for small and medium-sized businesses? I want training and education to work for work.
Before the Minister responds, I will make a short note on work placements. The APPG on the future of employability is looking at how we can increase the numbers of work placements available and allow people to gain experience at any time of their life. A constituent told me today that his daughter had an incredible work placement last week at Steller Systems in Nailsworth. It is a naval architecture company, so that is quite cool. She had a brilliant time learning with the staff in a highly specialist area; they did not need to give their time, but they did, and she will no doubt benefit from that for the rest of her career. We need to normalise those opportunities throughout the country.
On a final note, there were some empty Stroud noticeboards at Lansdown Hall during the pandemic, which were covered in the local newspapers. One of them said:
“The best way to learn anything is by doing it. Model some clay, carve a piece of wood—or a carrot! Sculpture can be made out of anything, I think it’s a question of finding a material and visual language that speaks to you.”
I say, “Over to you, Minister, to sculpt your response.”
Child Support (Enforcement) Bill
Siobhan Baillie ExcerptsWednesday 1st March 2023
(1 year, 9 months ago)
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Siobhan Baillie (Stroud) (Con)
It is an honour to serve under your chairmanship, Ms Bardell. I am grateful to you and to all the Committee members for joining me to look at the Bill in more detail.
This Bill is dry and technical, but it is important to say that child maintenance has a massive impact on the families who are reliant on it. All of us as constituency MPs will have cases coming across our desks and, as a family law solicitor, I know that the issues go far beyond ensuring that child maintenance gets to children and helping in situations of poverty. They can also sometimes affect whether children see their parents, because issues with child maintenance can have an impact on prolonging the conflict between parents and on other difficulties.
I am thankful to the Department, which is working so hard on child maintenance and on the Child Maintenance Service, and to my hon. Friend the Member for East Surrey (Claire Coutinho) who sponsored the Bill before she was made up to be a Minister. It is incumbent on all of us in this place to fix any problems that we see.
The Bill will enable a more efficient process to enforce unpaid child maintenance. It has only six clauses, but I am sure all hon. Members will recognise the Bill’s importance, as it will help to get much-needed money to children more quickly. Before going into more detail, however, I will recap briefly how the CMS works, just in case any hon. Members present whom I have pulled in to help in Committee are unaware.
The purpose of the CMS is to facilitate the payment of child maintenance between separated parents who are unable to reach their own agreement following a separation. That is an incredibly challenging job, done in difficult circumstances. Once parents are in the CMS system, it manages child maintenance cases through one of two service types: direct pay or collect and pay.
For direct pay, the CMS provides a calculation and a payment schedule, but payments are arranged privately between the two parents. That is by far the most favourable way to proceed. Where necessary, for collect and pay, the CMS calculates how much child maintenance should be paid, collects the money from the paying parent, and pays it to the receiving parent. Cases in collect and pay tend to involve parents where a more collaborative arrangement has either failed or not been possible to achieve, or there are high levels of conflict. Paying parents on collect and pay are therefore considered to be less likely to meet their payment responsibilities.
The difference child maintenance payments make to children’s lives is critical. I defer to charities such as Gingerbread, which does so much for single parents, mothers in particular. The Child Maintenance Service takes action to tackle payment breakdowns at the earliest opportunity, to re-establish compliance and to collect unpaid amounts that have accrued. Where compliance is not achieved and the parent is employed, the CMS will attempt to deduct the maintenance, including any arrears where appropriate, directly from their earnings. Employers are obliged by law to co-operate with such action.
Enforcement powers also allow for deductions to be taken directly from bank accounts, including joint and business accounts, either as a lump sum or a regular amount. That is a useful power where the parent is self-employed and deducting from their earnings is not possible. All the time, we still meet parents who do not know that the system is available or do not know its reach—that when their ex is self-employed, they can still have help.
Where such powers prove to be inappropriate or ineffective, under current legislation the Child Maintenance Service must apply to the magistrates or sheriff courts to obtain a liability order before the use of other enforcement powers, such as instructing enforcement agents or sheriff officers, or even more stringent court-based enforcement actions such as forcing the sale of a property, disqualification from driving or holding a UK passport, or commitment to prison. The Bill will amend uncommenced primary legislation to enable the DWP to take further enforcement action without the need to apply to the magistrates or sheriff courts, instead allowing the Secretary of State to make an administrative liability order.
This power, once enacted, will allow enforcement measures to be used more quickly against parents who have failed to meet their obligation. At the moment, to even get a liability order is taking about 20 weeks, and we all know that the courts are under increasing pressure, particularly post covid, so we will try to remove that step.
Let me turn to the specifics of the Bill. Clause 1 gives an interpretation of the primary legislation being amended by the Bill and defines the Child Support Act 1991 as “the 1991 Act” and the Child Maintenance and Other Payments Act 2008 as “the 2008 Act”. Clause 2 makes provision for the Secretary of State to make a liability order where the paying parent has failed to pay an amount of child maintenance and a deduction from earnings order is either inappropriate or has been ineffective. The clause provides an assurance that administrative enforcement measures will be appropriately considered before more stringent measures are taken.
Clause 3 expands the power to make administrative liability orders by setting out in regulations provision for the variation of a liability order—for example, where the amount of arrears upon which the liability order is based is subsequently amended as more information about the paying parent’s income is obtained. That works both ways. Sometimes the responding and paying parent needs to say, “I’m not earning as much as you think I am. I need to make a change.” Equally, the other parent may say, “Actually, he or she has more cash than they’re claiming”, so the clause is important.
Clause 4 gives the Secretary of State the power to set out in regulations provisions that relate to a parent’s right of appeal against a liability order. Those provisions will include the paying parent’s right of appeal to a court, the period within which the right of appeal may be exercised, the powers of the court in respect of those appeals, and for a liability order not to come into force in specified circumstances.
As with liability orders issued under current legislative provisions, in the event that a paying parent does appeal, the court will not be able to question the child maintenance calculation itself. Appeals about the maintenance calculation are dealt with via the appeals tribunal. A paying parent can ask the CMS to reconsider any calculation within 30 days of the calculation decision being made, through the mandatory reconsideration process. They can also report a change of circumstances that could lead to their calculation being amended at any time. It is therefore right for the role of the court when considering a liability order to be, as now, to satisfy itself that the debt is properly owed, and owed by the individual named in the order.
The provisions in clause 4 will prevent court time from being used to consider day-to-day CMS business that can be completed operationally—again, speeding things up—and it aims to strike a balance between giving a paying parent a reasonable window to appeal and the CMS moving swiftly to enforcement measures. The provisions will therefore not place any additional or unreasonable constraints on a parent’s ability to seek an appeal. I have acted for a number of fathers who came to me in a complete pickle, particularly in the old Child Support Agency days, because the calculations were wrong or allegations were made about their income. It is very important that a paying parent has the right to appeal. My dad had quite a lot to say about his own child maintenance payments when we were growing up—don’t get him started on that!
Clause 5 sets out minor and consequential amendments. Finally, clause 6 sets out standard but crucial information covering the extent, commencement and short title of the Bill, which will bring it into force.
I want to say a few words about the devolved Administrations, as it is important that we think through these issues. Primary child maintenance legislation is a reserved matter in Great Britain, but it is devolved in Northern Ireland. Northern Ireland has traditionally maintained parity with Great Britain by mirroring our child maintenance legislation. In respect of administrative liability orders, Northern Ireland has similar uncommenced provisions to those in Great Britain that it plans to commence, thereby enabling it to use and enforce administrative liability orders, so we are expecting Northern Ireland to get there. However, with the Northern Ireland Assembly suspended, it is not possible for Northern Ireland to match the changes that we are making through the Bill today, but it intends to do so as soon as it is able.
In Scotland, child maintenance is reserved but the judicial system is devolved. As such, the Scottish Government are engaged on the impact of the Bill in Scotland and exactly how its provisions will work in the Scottish court system.
The Bill is of great importance to ensuring that the Child Maintenance Service can make the necessary improvements to enforcement processes and get money to children more quickly. We are fortunate to have cross-party support, and I am grateful to the Government for backing the Bill and seeing the value in making these changes. We must ensure that when someone asks for help through CMS, they get help quickly and in a way that makes them feel supported. We must also ensure that parents who are messing about know that there will be sanctions and action against them, thereby providing a deterrent to other parents. I am grateful to the Minister and will be happy to hear from her today.
Tulip Siddiq (Hampstead and Kilburn) (Lab)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Ms Bardell. Let me start by congratulating the hon. Member for Stroud on securing cross-party support for this important Bill. Members may want to know that this is not the first time that she has campaigned on this topic; she campaigned on related issues even when she was a local councillor in my patch. I did not vote for her, but I recognise that she was a very good councillor and she has a long history of campaigning on issues relating to support for children.
Last year’s report by the Public Accounts Committee concluded that in the 10 years since the Child Support Agency was replaced by the Child Maintenance Service, there had been no improvement in the system for parents, children and families. The Committee’s shocking report found that around half of children in separated families—1.8 million children—receive no support at all from their non-resident parent, and that enforcement is just too slow to be effective, as the hon. Member outlined. That is a serious failing in the child support system, and we all know that it is often mothers who pay the price.
A mother in my constituency of Hampstead and Kilburn wrote to me to explain that her child’s father had not paid child support for three years. She had contacted the Child Maintenance Service on numerous occasions, but for three years there was simply no progression in her case at all. Eventually, she came to see me. Members across the Committee will know that our constituents come to see us in our surgeries as the last resort, having gone through everything else. I applied significant pressure as her MP and, in the end, the Child Maintenance Service launched an investigation. But it should not have come to that; it should not have been so difficult for my constituent in the first place.
Sadly, as I am sure Members across the Committee will know, that experience is far from uncommon. It has probably happened to everyone’s constituents at some point. Mothers and children across the country are missing out on the payments that they so desperately need to get by.
The implications for child poverty are particularly concerning. The Nuffield Foundation—a social mobility charity—estimates that as many as one in five single parents on benefits are lifted out of poverty by receiving child maintenance payments. That is to say nothing about the severe impact that non-payment of child maintenance can have on the mental health of children and families. That is why the Bill is so important to me and people across this country. It is completely right that absent parents honour their full child maintenance payments. When they fail to do so, there must be adequate enforcement to force them to pay, so that people’s lives are made easier.
Before I conclude, I have one question for the Minister. Enforcement action was significantly affected by the national lockdowns. Child Maintenance Service staff were redeployed to manage the surge in universal credit claims, and the courts were closed. But the number of enforcement agency referrals now in process is still less than half the figure before the pandemic. Can the Minister give me some information about what the Government are doing to address the backlog?
I fully support the Bill. I hope that it is successful and that it forms part of a wider strategy to ensure that the child maintenance system is fit for the 21st century.
Siobhan Baillie
I thank the Minister for her remarks and support, and I thank all Members present, particularly those I grabbed in various different places in the Palace to ask to serve on the Committee. I also thank the DWP officials and parliamentary officials for their guidance and support, and I thank you, Ms Bardell, for your excellent chairmanship.
The hon. Members for Hampstead and Kilburn and for Bootle were right to express concerns about the record and arrears, as highlighted in the National Audit Office report and by the Public Accounts Committee. I serve on the Work and Pensions Committee and we are investigating child maintenance. The Department and the Minister know that I am incredibly concerned about that because of the impact on families and children but, having met the officials, I know that a lot of work is going on. The DWP is given a hard time, but it is one Department—one arm of the state—that has such a direct impact on children and families.
I thank the hon. Member for Rutherglen and Hamilton West and the hon. Member for Caithness, Sutherland and Easter Ross, who does an incredible job with the APPG.
Yesterday, I was talking to an academic—an incredibly eloquent young woman—about family breakdown and the impact on women, and the impact of family breakdown as a feminist issue, which we do not often hear about. She said there has never been such a good time in history to be a deadbeat dad. I winced at that, because I know hundreds of fantastic dads and that there are millions of fantastic dads all over the country. But unfortunately, we discover in this work that the paying parents and the non-paying parents are invariably fathers, and if we scratch off a lot of that, a lot of absentee parents are fathers. We should not be shy about having these conversations and recognising what the Child Maintenance Service can do and the effect of improvements such as those in the Bill on family stability and children, and on their own relationships when they grow up, and on and on. We should not be shy about accepting that there is a wider benefit to change of this type.
I thank everybody who has been involved and all Committee members for coming in and sitting through our proceedings; I know how busy they are.
Question put and agreed to.
Clause 1 accordingly ordered to stand part of the Bill.
Clauses 2 to 6 ordered to stand part of the Bill.
Bill to be reported, without amendment.
Oral Answers to Questions
Siobhan Baillie Excerpts(1 year, 10 months ago)
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Mims Davies
I thank the hon. Lady for raising this matter, because it is important for employers to step up as well. Where they have vacancies, they should think about job design and being more welcoming to people wanting to take on more hours and to progress. That is some of the work we are doing through our changes to progression, working with our jobcentres. Of course, payments can also be made directly to the childcare provider, but I am very keen that this works for all parents and it is a matter I am looking at.
Siobhan Baillie (Stroud) (Con)
The DWP Committee has conducted an investigation into the childcare element of universal credit and, as we have heard, the offer is a good one, at 85% of costs paid. However, the system is not working and only 13% of eligible parents are taking it up. Parent after parent told us that they want to go out to work and that this is an issue. Will my hon. Friend confirm whether there have been discussions with the Treasury ahead of the spring Budget to think about funding our key asks of removing the up-front payment requirement and uprating the care?
Mims Davies
My right hon. Friend the Secretary of State takes a great interest in this matter, and I can assure my hon. Friend that we are all keen to see more parents in work. In fact, the current rate for lone parent employment is 64.6%. She knows this subject very well and advocates for change, so she fully understands the challenges. We will respond in due course to the Committee’s report, which was published at the end of last year. I reiterate my absolute passion for making this work for all parents.
Child Maintenance Services
Siobhan Baillie Excerpts(1 year, 11 months ago)
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Jamie Stone
My hon. Friend makes some very valid points indeed. Perhaps I should also pay tribute to the staff in my own office, and in the offices of all other MPs, who do fantastic, challenging and difficult work. It is very stressful for the staff members involved, so I pay tribute to them.
I want to focus on the ways in which the CMS can better support survivors of domestic abuse and safeguard receiving parents and their children from falling into poverty. It is quite clear that the CMS is not specialised or tailored to support survivors of domestic and economic abuse, so we in the APPG are glad to hear that the Government plan to use Dr Samantha Callan’s recommendations to introduce new domestic abuse training for CMS caseworkers, which will be delivered by a third-party external agency rather than in-house, as set out in the review published this morning, for which I thank His Majesty’s Government. However, our concern is that this does not go far enough. The training should be delivered by a specialist organisation, such as any of the organisations I have already thanked.
I am also glad to hear that the Government plan to protect survivors from having direct contact with abusive ex-partners when trying to obtain child maintenance payments, by giving them the choice to be moved on to collect and pay, the system by which the CMS collects a payment from the paying parent and pays it to the receiving parent without either party having to make direct contact, allowing claims to be made safely. That is an important point.
I understand that the system is more costly for the Government, but we strongly urge that these charges to the paying and receiving parents—20% and 4% respectively —are dropped for survivors of domestic abuse. The charges exacerbate already abusive relationships; they make them worse. Abolishing them would also be a simple way to safeguard against further refusal to make payments.
When it comes to safeguarding receiving parents from falling below the poverty line, I support the call for the CMS to make mandatory minimum payments to survivor receiving parents and to chase the paying parents themselves. This would take the burden of feeling forced to make direct contact away from the survivor and protect them from potential financial ruin. Given the historic failure of the CMS to enforce payments from perpetrators of economic abuse and the current cost of living crisis, we believe that the Government should seriously consider this recommendation.
Many of the problems come down to a fundamental breakdown of communication between the Department for Work and Pensions, and His Majesty’s Revenue and Customs. Perpetrators of economic abuse are able to get away with declaring no income if they are self-employed or a business-owner, therefore escaping the obligation to pay maintenance; this will be a situation familiar to Members of this House from all parties. The perpetrators are also able to avoid payments as the CMS has no legal enforcement capability, despite child maintenance being a legal obligation.
The Public Accounts Committee found that unpaid maintenance owed to parents on collect and pay to distribute payments is set to rise to £1 billion by March 2031. Can you believe that? The review by the National Audit Office in March 2022 stated that the work of the CMS has
“not, so far, increased the number of effective child maintenance arrangements across society.”
Siobhan Baillie (Stroud) (Con)
This work on child maintenance is incredibly important. The Work and Pensions Committee has also been looking at these issues and I have found the Ministers and the teams at DWP to be very receptive. Does the hon. Gentleman agree that when we are considering how to get money to parents through an enforcement process, the speed of the implementation of enforcement is just as important as the actual tool, and that involving courts can sometimes seriously delay the enforcement? Also, would he be willing to look at my private Member’s Bill about child maintenance enforcement options, which has Government backing?
Jamie Stone
I thank the hon. Member for her intervention. I think I can safely speak for all members of the APPG in saying that we would endorse what has just been said and we would gladly look at her Bill. One of the most encouraging aspects of the work—early as it is—of this new APPG is the cross-party support that there is for it. Regardless of political colour, there is a recognition that there is something very wrong and I am sure that we can improve that.
I will re-emphasise my opening point that currently the CMS is not working for anybody. In my own office, the bulk of cases come from constituents who are paying parents and who are being unfairly treated by the CMS. We have found that it is often the case for parents who have shared care that one parent has the child for more days than the other and is entitled to various child benefits but then asks for maintenance on top of that, despite the other parent caring for the child for two to three days a week without receiving any support from the Government. So there are different ways of looking at this issue.
In my office, we have also seen cases where parents have been making their payments properly and on time, but they have had those payments treated as being “voluntary”, and so they are not counted towards assessed payments.
It is clear that we need a fundamental overhaul of the way that the CMS works, so that it better protects receiving parents from economic abuse and the threat of poverty, and so that paying parents are not being unnecessarily chased by the CMS for payments they do not owe. This would require a proper and thorough understanding of domestic and economic abuse, a fundamental link between the DWP and HMRC, and an urgent review of the internal administrative efficiency of the CMS.
In closing, I will simply say that I make these remarks in this place in all sincerity and I hope that we can move forward on a cross-party basis, with help from His Majesty’s Government, to tackle this issue, which cuts deeply into many people’s lives and for the worse.
Child Support (Enforcement) Bill
Siobhan Baillie ExcerptsFriday 9th December 2022
(2 years ago)
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Siobhan Baillie (Stroud) (Con)
I beg to move, That the Bill be now read a Second time.
It should not be controversial across the House that parents should be responsible for their children unless they really cannot do that and need help. That parental responsibility is in all of us and the state welfare benefits and state systems in many other ways will step in to support families when it is absolutely necessary to do so. However, parents are too often let down by ex-partners for a range of reasons and they do not receive the support that they are due financially or otherwise.
In the case of child maintenance issues, parents who are receiving that money and, in many cases, relying on it to live on should be able to trust the child maintenance system to move as swiftly as possible to help them to recover maintenance arrears when it becomes necessary to do so. I am interested in that area through my experience as a family law solicitor, for my constituents who regularly bring incredibly complex child maintenance matters to me, and because this is an area of Government business—in a fantastic Department that works incredibly hard to help people who come to it with their issues—that can actually lift children out of poverty. I want to give the Child Maintenance Service, my constituents and everyone involved as much support as possible to do their job, which is where the Bill comes in.
This is an important measure to improve the recovery of arrears from parents who fail to meet their financial obligations to pay child maintenance. Before going into more detail about what this Bill aims to achieve, it may be helpful if I explain the purpose of the Child Maintenance Service for anybody who is not aware. The CMS is to facilitate the payment of child maintenance between separated parents who are unable to reach their own agreement following separation. That is an incredibly challenging job done in very difficult circumstances. Many Members will have experience of the CMS through their constituents. Some of that will be positive and some will be negative, but those Members who remember the Child Support Agency will I am sure acknowledge that the CMS, which was launched in 2012 to replace the Child Support Agency, is performing relatively well and is much better than previous systems. My parents are separated. My dad has some war stories about the Child Support Agency. We must not forget that that thing was on the front of newspapers, and that is not something that we see with this system, even though I am here in the Chamber saying that we can make improvements.
To emphasise the importance of the service, I should say that, in the past 12 months, more than £1 billion of payments were arranged or collected through the Child Maintenance Service. Under the Child Maintenance Service Act 2012, payments are calculated so that they are fair and affordable for both parents. That is key for these things to be successful.
The CMS uses gross income for calculation, whereas the old system was based on net income. To keep the impact of the calculation broadly the same, the 2012 scheme introduced modifications to the percentages with the banding system. In family law, it should be known that we would do the calculations for child maintenance for the parent client before us in our office before we turned to the other parent for other maintenance payments, so these calculations and the formula are important and it does work in many cases.
The statutory scheme is designed to limit the number of changes throughout the year. That is why the threshold for in-year changes to income is set at 25%, so that the liability remains consistent and parents can factor this into their own financial planning. Children are expensive. We need to be able to plan.
The CMS manages cases through one of two services. The first is direct pay and the second is collect and pay. Direct pay does what it says on the tin. The CMS provides a calculation and a payment schedule, but, effectively, the parents arrange the payments between them. For collect and pay, the CMS calculates how much maintenance should be paid, collects the money from the paying parent and pays it to the receiving parent, so it is a much more interventionist activity. Cases in collect and pay tend to include parents where a collaborative arrangement has either failed or has not been possible to achieve. Paying parents on collect and pay are therefore considered to be less likely to meet their payment responsibilities.
The difference that child maintenance payments make to children’s lives is critical, and the CMS takes action to tackle payment breakdowns at the earliest opportunity, to re-establish compliance and to collect unpaid amounts that have accrued. I give credit to groups such as Gingerbread, which often raise with MPs and Select Committees the impact on single parents; often, we are trying to help single parents through the CMS support schemes.
Where compliance is not achieved and the parent is employed, the CMS will attempt to deduct their maintenance, including any arrears where appropriate, directly from their earnings. Employers are obliged by law to co-operate with that action. Enforcement powers also allow for deductions to be taken directly from bank accounts, including joint accounts and business accounts, either as a lump sum or regular amounts—so far, so good. That is the run of the mill enforcement stuff. Members needed to understand that to understand the more severe enforcement measures used to collect child maintenance, which is what the main part of the Bill deals with.
The CMS is committed to modernising and improving and, as part of that commitment, it is reviewing the enforcement powers to make them as effective as possible in recovering arrears from parents who are failing to meet their financial obligations to their children. Under current legislation, the CMS must apply to the magistrates or the sheriff courts to obtain a liability order before the use of enforcement powers such as instructing enforcement agents or sheriff offices, or the use of more stringent court-based enforcement actions. So there is an extra step to go to court to get that stage of enforcement. Enforcements can include disqualification from driving or from holding a UK passport, or committing a non-compliant parent to prison. So it is serious stuff.
Obtaining a liability order through the courts is time-consuming. At the moment, the Government website tells parents that it can take anything from a few weeks to a few months. We know that there are now also an awful lot of delays in the courts—there was a pause during the pandemic, when the courts were closed—so I imagine it has been even more difficult recently to obtain these things.
That delay in receiving child maintenance has a consequence for the receiving parent and the children. Delay is bad for children, and we know that that principle underpins much family law. Furthermore, this additional step in enforcing debt is no longer required by other Departments, such as His Majesty’s Revenue and Customs. Other Departments are doing what my Bill is trying to achieve, so give me those powers so that the CMS can do the same.
We are also trying to introduce a lot of speed. The Bill will repeal the sections of the Child Support Act 1991 requiring the CMS to apply to the courts to obtain the liability order. It will stop applications to the courts by making amendments to uncommenced powers in the Child Maintenance and Other Payments Act 2008. Those powers, once enacted, will allow enforcement measures to be used more quickly against parents who have failed to meet their obligation.
Jerome Mayhew (Broadland) (Con)
My hon. Friend makes the good point that the procedural step in the current system of requiring the CMS to apply to the courts for a liability order creates delay. Can she give the House an indication, based on her experience, of the sort of delay we are talking about?
Siobhan Baillie
I have been looking through my casework, and the delay has been months in some cases. What is worse is that, even though the system we have is well-meaning, few parents have trust that anything will ever happen. Even where there have been successful liability orders—they are in the hundreds, and I have figures here—any delay becomes the chat in the communities and there is no trust. Any delay or confusion about what can and cannot be achieved is damaging to these families. I thank my hon. Friend for his important intervention.
To preserve the safeguards for paying parents, the Bill makes provisions for secondary legislation to allow the paying parent a right of appeal to a court against an administrative liability order—so there will be appeal rights. The first regulations relating to appeals against liability orders will be subject to the affirmative procedure.
The Bill will operate across England, Wales and Scotland, as they are all part of the same child maintenance regime. The court system governing the enforced collection of child maintenance is governed by broadly the same statutory provisions in England and Wales. In Scotland, however, the judicial system is devolved, so provisions in the Bill allow for a later commencement date, by which time changes to the appropriate court processes can be made. For that reason, the Child Maintenance Service will work with legal colleagues in the Scottish Government to ensure that the policy is effectively delivered in Scotland. I would also say, to those colleagues who always are interested in devolution issues, that Northern Ireland has its own arrangements.
To conclude, this is quite a techie thing—it is nerdy, which is why I like it. However, it introduces a genuine change for families on the ground by avoiding delay, which is harmful for children.
Dr Luke Evans (Bosworth) (Con)
My hon. Friend is making a fantastic speech and bringing forward a great piece of legislation. I was in the House only a few weeks ago supporting my hon. Friend the Member for Hastings and Rye (Sally-Ann Hart), who was making changes to the CMS for those suffering domestic abuse who are trying to get payments. Has my hon. Friend the Member for Stroud had a conversation with her about how this Bill can dovetail with her Bill? Perhaps the Government can take both Bills forward to provide extra protections for those who are struggling to get payments for their children.
Siobhan Baillie
I thank my hon. Friend for his intervention. I actually read all of that debate in Hansard, including his many interventions on my hon. Friend the Member for Hastings and Rye, so I think he just wanted to show you that he really knows his stuff, Mr Deputy Speaker. He is absolutely right that my hon. Friend the Member for Hastings and Rye is taking a Bill through the House that will protect people who have experienced domestic abuse, because so often, where there has been domestic abuse and a breakdown of a relationship, there is then no payment between the parents. It is probably very unusual for the Department to have to deal with two Bills, but we have very enthusiastic Members of Parliament who want to help families caught up in this system. I have real confidence in the Government teams and the Ministers to use the corporate knowledge for both these Bills and get this done.
This Bill will introduce a quicker and cheaper process to pursue enforcement, not just for the taxpayer but for the people who are waiting for their money, and it will ensure that more money is collected for more children. These are often children of single parents and children who desperately need £5, £10, £15, £20 or £100 a month—whatever the amount is, it will make a difference. I thank all Members in the Chamber for being here to debate the Bill and the Department for helping me with the drafting, and I very much hope it will receive support today.
Siobhan Baillie
With the leave of the House, I would like to thank all the hon. Members who have contributed to the debate, and particularly my hon. Friends the Members for Bracknell (James Sunderland), for Newbury (Laura Farris), for Broadland (Jerome Mayhew), for Darlington (Peter Gibson), for Devizes (Danny Kruger) and for Bosworth (Dr Evans). I have notes of all their key points, and I think it was my hon. Friend the Member for Bracknell who said that the Bill is a no-brainer.
The thing we have to be clear about is that family breakdown is absolutely devastating and often incredibly fraught. If the basics are wrong—if money is not flowing between the parents and payments are not being made—the fracture is compounded, and that is very damaging for children. The CMS plays a role not just as a calculator or a money box for people to get cash out of; it is actually fundamental. That is why I have been quite narrow in my scope today, although, unfortunately for the Minister and the Department, I am interested in many other areas of the Child Maintenance Service and universal credit and in the issues that the National Audit Office has raised.
The Bill will achieve administrative efficiencies for the Child Maintenance Service. That is better for the taxpayer, and it will get money into the pockets of the parents looking after the children, which is where it should be. I really hope the Bill makes progress in the House, and I thank everyone.
Question put and agreed to.
Bill accordingly read a Second time; to stand committed to a Public Bill Committee (Standing Order No. 63).
Supporting Disadvantaged Families
Siobhan Baillie Excerpts(4 years, 1 month ago)
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Siobhan Baillie (Stroud) (Con)
A long-term and local approach was always going to be the best thing to help families. I feel quite emotional about this, because I was told that I was starving children and that I was killing children—I had the worst abuse ever. I abstained because I wanted to help the Government to look at that long-term approach. If Opposition Members really thought that children would be starving over the half-term holidays, they would not have brought that just before the half-term holidays. The local approach is working and I ask the Secretary of State to give praise to charities such as The Long Table, the Freezers of Love initiative and Paganhill community groups, and say to them that the money and the funding will be there, because they know where the families are who they can help.
Dr Coffey
It is nice to see my hon. Friend back in the House after her maternity leave. She speaks with appropriate compassion and she recognises some of the local organisations in her area. I encourage her to work with them and her council to help to ensure that the £170 million funding can be effectively distributed, so that the most disadvantaged children and families are truly helped. We want to make sure that that activity continues to support similar children through the holiday activity fund.