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Child Maintenance Payments

Volume 456: debated on Wednesday 31 January 2007

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions which of the dedicated specialist teams referred to on page 25 of the White Paper “A new system of child maintenance” are in place as part of the Operational Improvement Plan. (113533)

The administration of the Child Support Agency is a matter for the Chief Executive. He will write to the hon. Gentleman with the information requested.

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions what mechanism he plans to use to assess the poverty status of (a) each parent with care and (b) each non-resident parent in order to achieve the objective of ensuring that the child maintenance system overall is designed to maximise its positive impact on child poverty. (113542)

We will be carrying out detailed work in order to work out how best to measure the success of the redesigned child maintenance system against the objectives detailed in the White Paper; “A new system of child maintenance”.

We will use the Family Resources Survey to assess the poverty status of parents with care. Poverty is defined here as living in a household which has income below 60 per cent. of equivalised median income before housing costs; this is the internationally recognised threshold of low income.

Non-resident parents cannot currently be identified directly on the Family Resources Survey so we will carefully consider how the proposed system of simplifying and improving the child maintenance assessment process will impact upon them.

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions what the projected cost is of (a) establishing and (b) running the Child Maintenance Enforcement Commission in (i) 2008-09, (ii) 2009-10, (iii) 2010-11, (iv) 2011-12 and (v) 2012-13. (113551)

These costs will depend critically on what choices parents make; how C-MEC will finally configure its services; and the details of the transitional arrangements to the new scheme. Consequently, precise year-by-year estimates are not currently available.

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions whether all the costs of establishing and running the Child Maintenance and Enforcement Commission will be met by a reduction in current projected budget allocations to the Child Support Agency. (113552)

The Child Maintenance and Enforcement Commission will replace the Child Support Agency when it is established and the funding of the costs of establishing and running the new organisation will be a matter for departmental planning in the usual manner. The combined effect of the reforms is, however, expected to lead to a dramatically reduced inflow of new cases. That will in turn lead to a reduced need for investment from taxpayers’ resources but the resources needed to provide a high-quality service will be available.

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions what the basis is for the decision to set the safeguard for changes in non-resident parent’s income at plus or minus 25 per cent., as proposed on page 61 of the White Paper “A new system of child maintenance”. (113556)

Under the current new child support scheme, any change in income of 5 per cent. will give rise to a recalculation in the liability for child support maintenance. This has led to the Child Support Agency facing a substantial workload of such reported changes. Therefore, as part of the redesign, it was decided that this threshold of 5 per cent. needed to be substantially increased. The issue was what the new figure should be.

Two main factors affect that decision, but they push in opposite directions. The first is the need to avoid too many recalculations of liability at the outset of an application as these slow up the progress of cases from application to first payment, which argues for the figure to be high.

The second is the need to be fair to the parties, not making the figure either too high or too low, compared to current income which argues for the figure to be low. Using plus or minus 25 per cent. in the Government’s view takes appropriate account of both these factors.