Separated Families Initiative

Yvonne Fovargue Excerpts

Tuesday 21st October 2014 Westminster Hall

[Sheila Gilmore (Edinburgh East) (Lab)]

It is a great pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Streeter. I understand that the Minister for Pensions, who normally leads for the Government on this area, is unable to be here today, but I am sure we can have a helpful and productive debate. I welcome the Minister for Employment in his place.

Within the past year, the Government have made significant changes to child maintenance policy, implementing the legislation that went through as part of the Welfare Reform Act 2012. First, the Child Support Agency has been wound down. Pre-existing child maintenance arrangements, which are used by nearly 2 million parents, are being terminated over the next three years. Secondly, all would-be applicants to its statutory replacement, the child maintenance service, must first talk to the child maintenance options service, where they are encouraged to make their own arrangements instead. Finally, for those parents who choose to use the CMS, a £20 application charge has been introduced, along with collection charges if parents fail to pay maintenance.

The clear policy intent is to encourage parents to sort out their own arrangements following relationship breakdown. The Government’s argument has been—and, I presume, remains—that family-based arrangements, as they are being called, will be better, because payers will be happier to pay if they have made the arrangements themselves. Further to that, the Government have asserted that the statutory system that has been in place for some years makes relationships between separated parties worse, because it creates bad feeling and anger. They think that the system might reduce willingness to pay, and encourage payers to look for a way to avoid payment.

Throughout, I have been a sceptic about that line of argument. In my experience, the circumstances of separation generate considerable anger and distress, and it is those feelings that often have to be worked with and worked through. As the period of separation continues, a failure to pay maintenance causes ongoing bad feeling. We know that parents with care suffer considerable financial detriment after separation. Indeed, generally both parties to a divorce suffer financial detriment, but the parent with care, whatever their gender, is the one who, in all the research, suffers the most. If proper payment arrangements are not in place, considerable resentment and anger can build up.

Given the Government’s approach, and that the reform is partly about trying to get people to change their behaviour, it is hugely important to ensure that parents get the sort of practical help and support they need to enable them to come to workable arrangements, especially given the changes to legal aid, which mean that people might not be getting the level of legal assistance they once had. That is where the £20 million Help and Support for Separated Families programme is supposed to come in. I will henceforth refer to it as HSSF, rather than saying the entire mouthful. I know it is not always terribly friendly to use abbreviations, but not using this one would become cumbersome and clumsy. I am afraid that the research I have undertaken shows that the programme of support for separating and separated families is piecemeal and inadequate.

There are four main initiatives that come under the HSSF programme, and I will set out my concerns on each in turn. The first is the Sorting out Separation service, which is a key online information and support resource for separated parents, signposting them to relevant help. Between November 2012 and January 2014, only 9,132 users clicked on a signpost to an external organisation, compared with the original target of 260,000. More people visited the front page, but the important thing is whether people are following through to get the more detailed help they need, because the initial information on the website is not sufficient to allow people to enter into arrangements. Given that the website cost more than £400,000 to set up—that was the figure by January, at least—it has cost more than £45 for every user signposted. I emphasise that the figures for this year come after an attempted redesign, which has clearly had a limited effect.

An evaluation commissioned by the Department for Work and Pensions and carried out between February and June last year reported that users were often unclear about the purpose of the site and the range of information it offered. They were frustrated by the low level of detail supplied prior to signposting. Videos on the site were felt to be “unreal”, with unrealistically positive endings, and a potentially useful action planning tool was criticised for offering only general signposting and not tailored information. Of particular concern, given that existing formal statutory arrangements are coming to an end, was the finding that the site was “less relevant and useful” for longer-term separated parents. Some 70% of the parents who will have their CSA cases closed have been separated for five years or longer, 40% have no contact with the other parent and 14% describe relations as “not at all friendly”. The inadequacy of the Sorting out Separation service might mean that they will find it unhelpful, and if they find it unhelpful, they will not be able to enter into new informal arrangements and will find themselves back in the formal system through the new CMS.

In April, the Minister for Pensions said that the Department was

“in the process of considering the future direction of the Sorting out Separation web app and will shortly be taking steps to improve the profile of the app through search engine optimisation.”—[Official Report, 8 April 2014; Vol. 579, c. 214W.]

Can the Minister for Employment tell us what the future of the service is, whether usage beyond the home page has risen and what steps have been taken to improve the content so that long-term separated parents are catered for?

The second arm of the HSSF programme funding is the co-ordinated telephone network. It is a telephone service provided by four organisations: Relate, Family Lives, the National Youth Advocacy Service, and Wikivorce. The service began full operation in March 2014 at a cost of £344,000. While I respect all the organisations concerned and the work they do, it is questionable whether they can provide the scale of support necessary for separating and separated parents across the country. Can the Minister tell us more about how the network is working in practice and how many parents have used it?

The third initiative of the HSSF programme is what the Government’s original White Paper referred to as a “quality mark”. It was to

“become a mark that parents can recognise and trust, so they know the service they are accessing is of a consistently high quality and will be able to help them to work together with the other parent.”

It was developed at a cost of £136,500, and 35 organisations have so far been awarded what is now called the HSSF mark. My concern is that the mark is not well understood or even recognised by parents. My impression is that the organisations that put a lot of work into applying for and being awarded the mark have seen little in return. I am unaware of any promotion of the mark to parents by the Department, so I hope that the Minister will be able to tell us what steps are being taken in that regard.

The fourth and most significant element of the HSSF initiative is the innovation fund, which accounted for £14 million of the total £20 million to be spent in the current spending review period up to March 2015. According to the White Paper that preceded the legislation, the fund was set up

“to learn what works best in helping separating and separated parents to collaborate and resolve conflict in order to support their children”.

In the first round of funding in April 2013, £6.5 million was awarded to seven projects across the country over a two-year period. Between them, they anticipated reaching just over 280,000 parents. A second round of funding worth £3.4 million came on stream in April 2014 and was awarded to 10 further projects aiming to reach some 12,800 parents. For the first time, projects aimed at longer-term separated parents were also included. I accept that this is relatively small-scale innovation funding; bearing in mind that nearly 2 million parents who have arrangements through the CSA are being taken off that following the new legislation, innovation projects coming in that will reach only perhaps 8,000 or 10,000 parents will not make much of an impression on the large number of parents affected by this major change.

Since starting in Scotland on 14 March, the family decision making service—one of this year’s funded projects that provides internet and telephone advice from Children 1st, One Parent Families Scotland and the Scottish Child Law Centre—has seen more families making informal arrangements. A particularly innovative aspect of its work has been designing publicity material to appeal more to fathers, which has led to more men using the service than would typically be expected. However, only 13 months’ funding was made available, which is a very short time in which to judge the success of any project.

Moving beyond anecdotal evidence of performance is difficult. In the 18 months since the first tranche of money was awarded, we have received little in the way of objective information. In March, we learned in a parliamentary answer that, as at 31 January 2014, 3,724 parents had participated in the seven first-round projects. Although it was early days—I know that the Relate project started late—that does seem low nearly halfway through the two-year funding period compared with the expected figure of over 280,000 parents by the end of the round-one projects. Unless there has been substantial take-up since then, we will fall far short of what is still a modest number of parents coming into contact with such help and advice. Will the Minister give us an update on the numbers of parents who have participated in the seven round-one projects so far and how that compares with expected levels at this stage?

Evaluation has also been significantly delayed, partly due to Department concerns around data protection. That is particularly problematic given that many projects are coming to an end and closing, and staff are likely to move into new employment, meaning that any evaluation that does take place will happen while the projects are winding down, which seems unsatisfactory. Earlier this year, the Minister for Pensions confirmed that the Government were in the process of appointing an external specialist to lead on the evaluation work. Is the Minister who is present today in a position to tell us whether an external evaluator has been appointed, who they will be and what the time scale of the evaluation will be?

This is about not just getting the evaluation started, but what the criteria will be. It was disappointing to hear the Minister for Pensions state in January that the evaluation criteria for the 17 projects would be published with the final results. We therefore do not know the criteria, and will not know them until the evaluation has been carried out, so people have not had the opportunity to comment on whether the evaluation is appropriate. The difficulty that that presents is that, as far as I can establish, the evaluation will not include receipt of child maintenance as one of the criteria by which the success of the projects aimed at improving parental collaboration will be judged. That is despite the fact that the innovation fund projects flow directly from the child maintenance reforms, and despite the White Paper stating that the initiatives would

“seek to support parents to reach their own arrangements, therefore avoiding both the statutory child maintenance system”.

It seems odd that that particular aspect is not to be evaluated in the process. We will not necessarily know, even at the end, whether there has been any significant success in getting people to not only meet and talk, but enter into family-based arrangements, and in getting maintenance flowing.

The HSSF funding ends in March 2015. My final questions concern what future funding will be made available to support the initiative.

[Yvonne Fovargue (Makerfield) (Lab)]

My hon. Friend is making an excellent speech on an important subject, and I congratulate her on securing this debate. She mentioned the schemes that have gone ahead, but is she as concerned as I am about the parts that did not go ahead—the local and face-to-face support that people were to be get in places where they felt comfortable? I know from personal experience how difficult separation is when one has a young child. There are many new agencies to contact, but is it not important that people can access advice from places where they feel comfortable?

[Sheila Gilmore]

I thank my hon. Friend for her intervention. That is a hugely important part of the process. It is all very well to have information available through modern methods of dissemination—being able to get basic information online cannot be a bad thing—but signposting to other places appears to be lacking.

The process is personal and can lead to difficult periods in most people’s lives, and people do not necessarily get the best information from word of mouth. Family and friends can offer emotional support, but they do not always give people the best advice in such situations. As a family lawyer, I met people who had been told weird and wonderful things about what they could or could not get. Such sources can also be out of date, because people will talk about things that happened to them in the past. However useful such advice can be as a starting point, it is crucial that those who want to get more personal advice—many will—can do so, whether one-to-one, or in a group setting where people feel comfortable and can ask the silly questions that it takes confidence to ask. We do not appear to have reached the stage of even looking at that, but it is important that we do.

On the March 2015 date, and the innovation projects set up to test what worked and what did not, it would be helpful to know how much information we will have, because there has been little evaluation so far. What guarantees do we have that what has been found to work will be scaled up to the numbers necessary? Even beyond 2015, more than 1 million parents will have arrangements with the CSA that have yet to be closed down. In addition, all the people with new separations, whose relationships are only beginning to break down, will want to come forward for help. What system will be in place to help those families sort out their child maintenance collaboratively? If the Government are serious about wanting people to make such arrangements so that maintenance is paid for the benefit of the children, we have to ensure that proper support and advice is in place.