I beg to move, That the Bill be now read the Third time.
This Bill is an important measure designed to improve the recovery of arrears from parents who have failed to meet their financial obligation to pay child maintenance. It will help to ensure that the Child Maintenance Service continues to deliver a modern, efficient and reliable service that parents can have confidence in. The Bill plays an important part in that by getting money to more children faster to enhance their life outcomes.
I think that it is important that I offer my sincere gratitude to my hon. Friend the Member for Stroud (Siobhan Baillie), who, owing to her rock-solid commitment to her constituents, cannot be here today. It is an honour to pick up on her hard work introducing the Bill, leading Second Reading and shepherding the Committee. I am proud to be able to bring the Bill before the House again, and I am delighted that it has such received such excellent support from the Government thus far.
My thanks must go to the Under-Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, my hon. Friend the Member for Mid Sussex (Mims Davies), for her work on Second Reading and in Committee. I am also most grateful to the Minister for Disabled People, Health and Work, my hon. Friend the Member for Corby (Tom Pursglove), whom I thank profusely for his support. The cross-party support throughout the Bill’s passage has also been extremely welcome, and I hope that it will continue.
For the benefit of those who were not present for the Bill’s previous stages, I will give a brief recap of its policy background and purpose. The purpose of the Child Maintenance Service is to facilitate the payment of child maintenance between separated parents who are unable to reach their own family-based agreement following separation. Once parents are in the system, the CMS 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 the payments are arranged privately between the two parents. 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.
Collect and pay cases tend to involve parents for whom a more collaborative arrangement has failed or has not been possible to achieve, so paying parents in collect and pay arrangements are considered less likely to meet their payment responsibilities. We all know the difference that child maintenance payments can make to children’s lives—they can be critical—so it is absolutely vital that the Child Maintenance Service take action to tackle payment breakdowns at the earliest opportunity to re-establish compliance and collect unpaid amounts as quickly as possible. Where compliance is not achieved and the parent is employed, the CMS will attempt to deduct maintenance, including any arrears, directly from their earnings. Employers are obliged by law to co-operate with that action.
I support the Bill and the work that has been done to make it happen. Does my hon. Friend agree that it will make a massive difference for many families across the country? Many people, including my constituents in Watford who come to my surgeries to ask about this topic, will welcome the Bill, and I hope that other colleagues will support it in its passage through the House.
My hon. Friend is correct, as usual. Many hon. Members see people in surgeries and through casework with difficulties in accessing the vital childcare payments that help to support a child. Many people are dealing with delays, like Louise from Buckshaw in my constituency. This is an important piece of legislation.
Let me explain how the Bill will speed things up. CMS enforcement powers also allow for deductions to be taken directly from bank accounts, including joint and business accounts should somebody be self-employed, either in a lump sum or as a regular amount. That is a useful power when the parent is self-employed and taking deductions from PAYE earnings is not possible. When such powers prove inappropriate or ineffective under current legislation, the CMS must apply to magistrates or sheriffs courts to obtain a liability order before the use of further enforcement powers such as instructing enforcement agents or sheriff officers or even more stringent, court-based enforcement actions, such as forcing the sale of property, disqualification from driving, holding a UK passport, or even potentially commitment to prison for not paying child maintenance.
The Bill would amend uncommenced primary legislation —laws that have been previously passed—to enable the Department for Work and Pensions to take further enforcement action without the need to apply to a magistrates or sheriffs court. Instead, it would allow the Secretary of State to make an administrative liability order. This power, once enacted, would allow enforcement measures to be used more quickly against parents who have failed to meet their obligation, reducing administrative steps and therefore speeding up the process. While getting child maintenance to our children more quickly has to be of primary importance in introducing this power, it is also important that the Bill does not simply allow the CMS to forge ahead with its most invasive and stringent enforcement measures without some protections for paying parents who would potentially be subject to the liability orders.
I congratulate the hon. Member for Stroud (Siobhan Baillie) on her hard work in seeing the Bill through to its final stages. I was honoured to be on the Bill Committee a couple of weeks ago, and she already knows that it has my full support. The hon. Member for South Ribble (Katherine Fletcher) has been a very able proxy for her today.
In my office we are no stranger to cases related to the Child Maintenance Service. They are some of the most frustrating cases, because they often come down to exactly the same problem, which drags on for years and is nigh-on impossible to resolve: non-custodial parents who are not keeping up with their financial responsibilities to their child and are intentionally avoiding making payment to the receiving parent.
The CMS technically already has the power to take further action where non-compliance has become a persistent issue. However, I know from my casework that it is not that straightforward. It will often require a court order. Waiting for the case to make its way through the already overburdened legal system can feel endless—and that is when the CMS actually investigates the more serious cases. I have seen far too many that have not reached the enforcement stage that they should have reached months or even years before.
I have a case open in which a non-compliant parent was investigated and a court date was set, but they never showed up. The sheriff issued a warrant for their apprehension in September last year, but the letter I received from the CMS just last week mentions that only in passing; it does not seem to have been followed up since then. For someone like my constituent, the Bill could really make a difference. I have seen CMS statements showing the child support that my constituents are owed. Sometimes the arrears have crept up into the thousands: one constituent was owed £10,000, but no enforcement action had been taken despite her pleas.
I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Stroud (Siobhan Baillie) on introducing such an excellent Bill, and my hon. Friend the Member for South Ribble (Katherine Fletcher) on supporting its final stages in this House. It is a brilliant example of MPs working together to make brilliant legislation.
My hon. Friend the Member for Stroud has been an extremely doughty campaigner in this field of policy. The scene has been set for the Bill for more than the past decade. It is important that we recognise the work that the Government have been doing to improve the child maintenance system, from introducing the 24/7 digital service to supporting those who are trying to decide what arrangements are most suitable for their situation, and increasing the number of referrals to enforcement agents. The Bill adds to that work.
The CMS is a vital service that makes a huge difference to families who have separated. That said, the improvements in the Bill are welcome. We saw an excellent example of improvements recently in the Child Support Collection (Domestic Abuse) Bill of my hon. Friend the Member for Hastings and Rye (Sally-Ann Hart), which I was glad to support just a couple of Fridays ago.
I am sure that I am not alone in the Chamber in regularly reading in my postbag about parents who use the CMS. I am always taken aback when I get the emails or correspondence from a constituent who is having problems getting a former partner to pay for child maintenance. They have an agreement; they have been through the courts, have separated legally and have maintenance support in place, but the partner not living with the child is not paying. It has always struck me when, no matter what arguments or problems adults may have in the former relationship, the parent who is supposed to pay for the child refuses to do so. It is the child who loses out and is probably not having a the relationship with the partner not living in the household, which adds to the further pain of a broken relationship between parent and child. I hope that the Bill may go some way to improving the situation between a child and a parent who does not live with them, no matter what the relationship with their former partner.
It gives me great pleasure to speak in this morning’s debate, and I am very grateful to my hon. Friends the Members for South Ribble (Katherine Fletcher) and for Stroud (Siobhan Baillie) for bringing this Bill before the House. I will first look for a moment at the Government’s record on improving child maintenance services, which I will comment on briefly before coming back to the Bill, because that will perhaps set it in more context.
Some 64% of paying parents using the collect and pay service paid some of their scheduled child maintenance in the quarter ending September 2022, an increase from 60% in the quarter ending March 2018, so there has been an improvement. Over the past 12 months, the Child Maintenance Service has arranged over £1 billion in child maintenance payments. The majority of applications are now made digitally, making it even easier for parents to access support for their children. The upgraded online account, “My Child Maintenance Case”, allows customers to access and maintain data for themselves. An increasing number of changes of circumstance can also be reported, and the 24/7 digital service “Get help arranging child maintenance” makes the CMS more accessible for customers deciding what type of arrangement is most suitable for them.
I am pleased that the CMS has brought forward the point at which deductions from bank accounts can be made. It is now making better use of deductions from earnings orders so that they can be set up much more quickly, reducing the time required to process those payments. In 2021-22, the Government made more referrals to enforcement agents than in any other year, and the number of liability orders applied for each year is now back to pre-pandemic levels. My final point in this section is that the CMS works with other Government Departments to improve the use of enforcement powers and explore the possibility of introducing new powers for cases in which people are wanton. That is the context in which I would now like to comment on my support for the Bill that is before the House.
Happy St Patrick’s Day, Madam Deputy Speaker. It is a pleasure to follow my hon. Friend the Member for Clwyd South (Simon Baynes), and I put on record my thanks to my hon. Friend the Member for Stroud (Siobhan Baillie) for initially tabling the Bill, and to my hon. Friend the Member for South Ribble (Katherine Fletcher) for being Manchester’s top hon. Member for Stroud tribute act. As everybody knows, she has a clear and consistent record on this subject, and it is very good of her to step in on behalf of our colleague, who—as she says—is committed to something else in her constituency, but dearly wanted to be here.
I also put on record my thanks to the Under-Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, my hon. Friend the Member for Mid Sussex (Mims Davies), and the Minister for Disabled People, Health and Work, my hon. Friend the Member for Corby (Tom Pursglove), for the work that they have done on this Bill. We often consider important Bills on sitting Fridays, but we do not see all the work behind the scenes to make them into functioning legislation after the Government decide to back them. It is a tribute to the Ministers that they got this Bill into good order.
It is a privilege to speak on this Bill because it addresses some of the key gaps in the current child maintenance collection system. I was recently asked whether I had a special interest in this area, and it will come as a shock to no one in the Chamber that I do not have children—my biological clock is ticking—but I am a child of divorced parents. I am very lucky, as my parents are happily divorced. They like each other much more now they are not married. There was never any acrimony in that relationship, but the truth is that around half of marriages now end in divorce, and some of them do not end in the best circumstances.
Although we rely on the best human behaviour for parents to come to an amicable arrangement, and many can do that, there will be instances in which it simply is not possible. With the best will in the world, interfacing with the courts, especially post-covid, makes it an almost insurmountable task for some parents to get the money they need to bring up their child.
In one case, a lady spent 12 years trying to get payments from her former partner. Her son is now 25 years old and is a qualified accountant dealing with child maintenance cases. That is the absurdity of the system.
In another case, a woman had fought for more than 10 years and had six court dates before she was finally paid the £16,000 she was owed in unpaid maintenance. She was working multiple jobs just to put food on the table, even though her former partner had the ability to provide the funds her child needed.
I was pleased to support the Child Support Collection (Domestic Abuse) Bill, introduced by my hon. Friend the Member for Hastings and Rye (Sally-Ann Hart), as it takes into account the role abuse can play in this process. The two Bills are obviously different, but they have an underlying connection.
The two cases I have highlighted magnify some important points. First, they establish that delays in child maintenance harm children. Secondly, the Bill will help to re-establish trust in the system, as single parents will not have to battle for decades to collect child support. It is important people have faith that the system will be there for them when they need it.
I am proud to support this Bill, which will give financial certainty to thousands of families up and down the country. My hon. Friends the Members for Stroud and for South Ribble, and everyone at the DWP who has worked on this, can be extremely proud that they are doing something that, while seemingly simple, will make a massive difference to a large number of people.
May I first acknowledge that my hon. Friend the Member for Stroud (Siobhan Baillie), who is not here today, has done some excellent work on this Bill, as has my hon. Friend the Member for South Ribble (Katherine Fletcher) in moving its Third Reading today? I was lucky enough to be called on Second Reading in December. Previous speakers have acknowledged, as would everyone in the House, that many parents are struggling because of recent price rises. I welcome the fact that supporting parents, both single parents and those who are together, was a key theme in this week’s Budget. Childcare provision has been expanded to 30 hours per week for children aged nine months to four years to help drive down household costs, as well as to give parents breathing space to pursue both personal and professional opportunities. However, I am aware of cases, both in my constituency and across the country, of parents struggling further because of a lack of financial support from co-parents with whom they no longer reside.
Parents have a duty to support their children, and that duty remains even if they are not the main day-to-day carer and/or residing parent. I understand that relationships and marriages can break down, for an array of reasons, and parents can often wish for limited communication with their former partner. But in the cases where parents look at ways of minimising child maintenance payments to their former partners, that ultimately means less money available to their children day to day: less money for school uniforms, for food and for extra-curricular activities, which are a vital part of developing skills for children at a young age.
My constituency is home to a lot of young families. One of these constituents, Nicola, came to visit me at my surgery in Croxley Green in April 2022. She is a single mother of two daughters and she came to discuss the difficulties she had experienced in getting paid fairly by the children’s father. What struck me most—this goes back to my point about how these cases can often punish the children most—is that there had been multiple instances of her daughters crying in school because of the nature of their parents’ relationship. Nicola told me about her frustration with the enforcement by the CMS; by September 2022, her former partner was in arrears by more than £13,000. Although the DWP have identified that there are issues with the amount the children’s father has to pay, it has highlighted difficulties in enforcement and delays in carrying out further financial investigations. It has now been a year since Nicola first came to see me, which highlights the difficulties I know many parents have in receiving the child maintenance payments they deserve. It is also a perfect example of how the DWP and CMS are somewhat limited in their powers in investigating and enforcing in these cases.
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I know how much these matters can affect families, including children such as Caleb and Isa.
With that in mind, the Bill and any regulations developed in support of it, would ensure that those important protections are in place. They will provide an assurance that these new administrative enforcement measures are appropriately considered before an administrative liability order is imposed. Using a process similar to this has worked well in respect of administratively authorised deductions from bank accounts over a number of years. This provision further clarifies the picture. Those protections will also ensure the paying parent has a right of appeal to a court by setting out in secondary legislation: 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.
It is important to reiterate that the provisions being introduced in the Bill and the supporting regulations will not place any additional or unreasonable constraints on a parent’s ability to seek an appeal, while allowing the CMS to move swiftly and appropriately to enforcement measures, reducing what is at the moment primarily an administrative step.
As I hope I have made clear, the Bill is important to ensure that the Child Maintenance Service can make essential improvements to processes of enforcement and get money to children more quickly. I hope that we can all agree that this is an uncontentious measure that is worthy of support today, and I look forward to its making progress in the other place.
Another serious issue that is allowed to continue while payments are not enforced is the re-victimisation of survivors of coercive control, domestic violence and economic abuse. Too many women have reported how their ex-partner has been allowed to continue to exert their control and abuse them by exploiting the system. That cannot be allowed to happen: there must be consequences for it.
I do not want to derail the debate by going into all the systemic issues with the CMS and the real need for its reform, but it is so important that we all remember who loses out when support is not paid. Too many people look just at the often fraught relationship between two ex-partners, but it is the children who are losing out. It is the children who are living in financial difficulties when they might not need to—innocent children who have absolutely nothing to do with their parents’ quarrels.
That is particularly true in the current economic climate, with all the difficulties that the cost of living crisis and rising inflation are presenting to households across the United Kingdom. The number of children living in poverty in this country is already unacceptably high, yet research shows that if maintenance were being paid in full just in cases in which the custodial parent is currently receiving no financial support from the non-resident parent, it would lift 60% of those children out of poverty.
The Bill will not fix all the problems at the CMS. It is the job of the Government to understand the root cause of the problems and legislate to fix them, but the Bill will make a real, tangible change for a lot of single-parent families. I am delighted to be here today to watch the Bill tabled by the hon. Member for Stroud get ever closer to making that difference.
Some 3 million children across the country live in separated families, and 60% of those families have a child maintenance arrangement. That adds up to £2.4 billion a year in child maintenance payments. For the most part, the transactions are regular and reliable. However, in some cases—as we have heard, it is always the acute cases that Members of Parliament are aware of—regular child support maintenance payments are not forthcoming. For that reason I am pleased that the Bill improves enforcement measures against parents who have failed to meet their obligations. It is a sad state of affairs that we have to legislate to enforce parents paying for their children’s maintenance, but for the minority of cases, needs must. That is why I commend my hon. Friends the Members for Stroud and for South Ribble for introducing the Bill.
Sadly, the pandemic added to enforcement delays for failed payments. It has had so many knock-on effects for us as individuals and as a society. Most of that was down to existing technical or capacity issues, be that complications with liability orders or streamlining who can facilitate enforcement. The Bill could come at no better time. Improving enforcement measures and strengthening the CMS will have a huge impact on ensuring that payments are collected in a timely manner. Clause 2 is so important because it grants the Secretary of State greater powers to intervene without the need to apply to the magistrates or sheriff court, and to ensure that CMS disputes are resolved in a timely manner. We cannot expect a child and the parent who they are living with to have to wait for the money to come through. In a cost of living crisis, that money can make a huge difference to a child’s wellbeing.
Replacing the existing requirement under section 33 of the Child Support Act 1991, the Secretary of State will be able to apply to the courts for a liability order. That will go a long way to reducing the backlog of cases and is very welcome. Likewise, there are clauses that speak to a parent’s right of appeal and steps to ensure that a lack of payment does not become an increased driver of child poverty. Much of the Bill deals with the way in which child support payments are recovered in cases in which arrears have accumulated.
I have no doubt that the Bill will be welcomed by hundreds of thousands of families up and down the country who have to go through the CMS. Therefore, it is essential that we press forward with the sensible, thoughtful and practical reform that it provides. I look forward to seeing the legislation on the statute book shortly.
The key points of the Bill are that where the DWP agrees that a person has failed to pay an amount of child support maintenance, and a deduction from earnings has not been possible or is not appropriate, the Bill will enable the DWP to make a liability order in respect of that amount against the person, rather than going first to the courts. The person against whom the liability order is made has the right to appeal to a court against the making of that order, but the amount of child support maintenance cited in the order cannot be challenged. Currently, the Child Maintenance Service aims to recover arrears from the non-resident parent—alternatively, the paying parent—within two years, and expects them to pay up to 40% of their income to clear their arrears.
As my hon. Friends, and indeed the hon. Member for Rutherglen and Hamilton West (Margaret Ferrier), have commented this morning, the delays that currently exist cause huge problems for families. I have seen that very much from the emails and pleas for help that I have received from my constituents in Clwyd South, many of whom are involved in the receipt of child maintenance services. Therefore, it gives me great pleasure to support this Bill, which will be of considerable help to not only my constituents but many other people across the UK. Like many of the Bills that we discuss on sitting Fridays, it seems to me that this one will make a really important change to legislation that will be of huge benefit to many people across the country.
I will try to be brief and to the point, because this is an excellent Bill that I actively support. The welfare of children will be drastically improved by this Bill. Delays in obtaining a court order for the payment of child maintenance have a significant impact on the health and wellbeing of children all over the country. My hon. Friend the Member for Cities of London and Westminster (Nickie Aiken) made the eloquent point that this is about the welfare of children. It baffles me that there are parents who genuinely have a casual disregard for the wellbeing of their own offspring in the bizarre game they play with their former partners.
One of the Bill’s central tenets, enabling the DWP to make a liability order in certain circumstances without first going to the courts, addresses a key problem in the current system and is particularly pertinent given the rising cost of living. I welcome clause 2 and the administrative liability orders, which are an elegant solution to the problem of attrition whereby some parents can afford to wait out their former partners—I think that is extremely cruel.
I agree with the hon. Member for Rutherglen and Hamilton West (Margaret Ferrier) that it is incredibly frustrating to read about some of these cases. Some individuals exercise coercive control over a partner who then takes the very difficult and sometimes painful step to separate themselves from this person who has dominated their life so much, only for that person to exercise further coercive control by withholding the funds needed to bring up their child. I have dozens of examples from my own casework, but I will highlight just two.
That is not to say that the CMS and the Government have not done a good job in ensuring that correct payments are made. In the past 12 months, the CMS has arranged more than £1 billion in child maintenance payments. In 2021-22, the Government made more referrals to enforcement agencies than in any other previous year, and the number of liability orders applied for each year is now back to pre-pandemic levels. The CMS works with other Government departments to improve the use of enforcement powers and to explore the possibility of introducing new powers for cases in which people are being wanton.
I welcome the fact that this Bill has been introduced and that it addresses the gaps in the DWP’s enforcement powers. The Bill will amend not-yet-commenced primary legislation to enable the DWP to take further enforcement action without the need to apply to the magistrates or sheriffs courts, instead allowing the Secretary of State to make an administrative liability order. That power, once enacted, will allow enforcement measures to be used more quickly against parents who have failed to meet their obligations. It is crucial that the system is built to ensure fairness for hard-working parents and, most importantly, that it supports the children, who in these cases are the most important. To support people such as Nicola up and down the country, I will be supporting this Bill.