The Child Support Agency

19th October 2004

In my three and a half years as a Member of Parliament, many issues have featured regularly at my weekly surgery, but one that causes misery to many constituents, mostly young mothers and their children, is the problem of dealing with the Child Support Agency. That is why I am delighted to have the chance to raise a number of concerns today. If there are any of them that the Minister cannot answer this morning, I hope that she will contact me when she has the answers.

The problems faced by my constituents are not new. I am sure that many of the issues that I wish to raise today will be familiar to the Minister, not only because of her work in the Department for Work and Pensions but because, like every other hon. Member, she will have listened to her constituents as I have listened to mine. They are usually young mothers, but sometimes fathers, trying to get by and to do their level best for their children—the children of the many ex-partners who refuse to play a part in their children's maintenance.

We often hear of Fathers 4 Justice, in this place as well as outside, but although they are not so vocal and do not indulge in stunts, many more mothers suffer in silence. They need someone to speak up for them. I hope that this debate will help raise their profile in an altogether quieter and more measured way. The fact that they do not scream from rooftops, crane-tops or Buckingham palace does not mean that they do not suffer as much, and in many cases more, than those high-profile cases that we hear so much about. However, for as long as the CSA remains unchanged, hon. Members will continue to see problem cases in their surgeries —and Ministers should expect to continue responding to debates such as this.

I am not one of those people who believe that we should approach the CSA in a party political way. Neither the Minister nor I were Members when the Child Support Act 1991 was enacted, but she will know that there was broad cross-party consensus on the creation of the CSA. I would like to see cross-party agreement on its abolition, but I accept that we do not yet seem to have reached that stage. The basic point is that the Child Support Agency is not working as well as it should, and for many people it has never worked well.

Only last week, the CSA was described in The Independent as being on the brink of collapse. Having already written off more than £1 billion of arrears as uncollectable, the CSA still owes half a million parents a total of some £720 million. There is now a backlog of 30,000 cases, with less than half the amount owed to the CSA this year being collected. To make matters worse, the new £456 million computer system, designed to make the agency more efficient, is struggling to cope. With half the total number of CSA cases, that system is just not doing the job. That is totally unacceptable. This is a service involving children, in some cases very vulnerable children, which makes the situation deplorable.
 
All hon. Members have their own CSA stories. The most basic problems with the agency can be summed up in a letter that I received from someone living in Corstorphine in my constituency. She wrote:

"I submitted an application to the Child Support Agency in June 2003, but despite several phone-calls to them, I have had absolutely no communication from them at all. When I phoned in, I was told that my case was being dealt with as a clerical case and that the best way to progress it was to lodge a complaint, which I did. I received a letter acknowledging receipt of the complaint and was told they would be in touch. I didn't hear anything further so at the beginning of December, I tried contacting them again for an update on my case. I spent three hours on the phone getting passed from person to person and not one of them was able to give me any information. I spoke to seven different people and each time, I had to explain the situation only to be told that I'd been put through to the wrong department. I eventually got through to someone who said they would leave a message for the person dealing with my case and he would call me back the following day. I waited over a week and there was not contact so I tried him again and the same thing happened. I was told to phone one number then another and then another. I left another message to be called back and I'm still waiting."

It is disgraceful that people such as my constituent are    being left in limbo, with communications left unanswered and messages not responded to.
Far and away the most extraordinary CSA case I have come across is that of one of my constituents in Barnton—a case that is still continuing four years after    the original application. In July 2000, my constituent gave the CSA all the necessary documents for a maintenance decision to be taken. After hearing nothing for several weeks she contacted the CSA again, only to be told that they had no documentation about her, and she should send the forms again. A few days later she received a letter from the CSA, returning the very documents that it had told her it had lost, and asking for more information. She phoned the Hastings office, to be told that her case was being dealt with in Falkirk. She then phoned the Falkirk office, to be told that her case was being dealt with in Hastings. Even the staff at the CSA admitted that their dealings with her case had been a bit of a shambles.

Eventually, my constituent's papers were found in the Hastings office. The CSA made a maintenance calculation, but no payments were ever made by her ex-husband to the CSA. Rather than pursuing the ex-partner for payment, the CSA simply added the missed amounts on to future payments. Of course, those payments were not made either. Then, in 2002, two years after the original application was made, the CSA finally got round to making a liability order for payment to the sheriff's office. It took another year for a public auction of my constituent's ex-partner's office goods to be organised. At that auction he handed over a cheque for £1,000 to stop the sale and the auction was cancelled—but what happened next? The cheque to the CSA bounced.

All that is rumbling on, and my constituent rightly queries the exact monthly amount of child maintenance awarded by the agency. She advised the CSA that her ex-husband had extra property from which he was receiving an income, and did additional work for which he received a salary. Those amounts were not included in the CSA's calculations. Yet the CSA chose to ignore that. It appears that it never carried out any investigations to verify the claims.
 
On 23 July 2003 we requested a full report about the CSA findings on my constituent's case, and were told that such information would be provided in 28 days. Despite constant chasers we did not receive that report until 31 December 2003—161 days after the request, which is five times the promised time. While all that was going on, my constituent was not receiving any money. I   wrote again to the CSA on 28 June and did not receive   a response until, interestingly enough, I secured this Adjournment debate. None the less, four years and three months after the original application, my constituent has not received a penny in child support. Her case is one of the 25 per cent. of CSA cases—a staggering one in four—in which no payments have ever been made.

The delays that my constituent has faced in getting her money are bad enough, but her case also highlights two further systemic problems with the CSA. First, there is a problem with the agency taking ex-partners' declarations of income at face value. There has been a particular problem where the ex-partner is self-employed and it is difficult to verify profits and income independently. I came across another case involving an ex-husband who said that his income was £100 a week, on which basis the CSA calculated maintenance. Yet anyone who looked closely at that man's lifestyle—he had holidays and a new car, and had bought a new house—would see that it could not be supported on £100 a week. Any proper investigation by the CSA would have discovered that, but no investigation took place.

That leads to the second issue: the fact that lack of action by the agency forces the parents with care to become, effectively, private investigators. All too often the CSA leaves it up to parents with care to prove that the income of the non-resident parent is higher than declared, rather than forcing the non-resident parent to prove that their income is as low as they have declared. That simply cannot be right.

The report of the Work and Pensions Committee was pretty damning about the new computer system: £456 million was spent, yet 75,000 cases have been lost or stuck in the system. The contrast is clear. Why are so many cases stuck? Is that an IT problem, a personnel problem, or the fault of EDS, the company that supplies the data system? For every individual whose case is stuck, the problem is a major one.

The Committee concluded that CSA customers were receiving "an appalling level of service."

Its findings are borne out by cases in Edinburgh, West, as I am sure that they are in every constituency in the country.

One of my constituents, Mrs. Wood, had been receiving regular payments until June this year, when the payments mysteriously stopped. On contacting the CSA she found that that had nothing to do with the money from her ex-partner, as maintenance was still being paid to the CSA. However, for some reason the computer had stopped forwarding payments to her account. Since then, not only has she never received the correct monthly payment but she has received a new payment schedule that is totally inaccurate. I would like the Minister to go into some detail about whether that is the fault of the IT system. Experience with the CSA shows that it can be difficult enough getting correct payments from some non-resident parents, but surely when the correct payments are made, such as in the case of Mrs. Wood, the CSA should forward those payments, on time and in full.

I want to give the Minister as much time as possible to reply, but before I finish, I want to raise the wider issue of what to do with the CSA as an agency. The Minister will know of my party's long-standing policy of    abolishing the CSA and moving its assessment and    enforcement functions to the Inland Revenue. Considering the amount of cross-checking the CSA should do with the Inland Revenue, but does not always do, that would seem an entirely practical and sensible proposition. I know that the idea has even received support from some of the Minister's own Back Benchers. I still have not heard a reasonable argument put forward by the Government as to why such a move should not happen. I accept that it would not remedy things overnight. However, it is a serious proposition that could give the kind of joined-up government that the Minister and her colleagues always promise.

It may be easy to think of child maintenance and the CSA simply in terms of the transfer of money. However, we must never forget the purpose of that money is to protect the many children—in some cases children who   remain in poverty—who need and deserve that extra help. As a father, I can never understand parents walking away from their own children and their parental responsibilities. However, we live in the real world, a world in which that absence of responsibility exists.
Although for some people the CSA exists only as a formal means to transfer money, surely the agency's key task is to prevent parents who try to avoid their responsibilities from doing so. That is where the CSA is failing in its most basic of aims: the protection of children. Far too many children are simply not getting the money they need and deserve. Although that is often the fault of the absent parent, the Minister has to accept that in too many cases—tens of thousands of them—children are not getting the help they need because of the direct failure of the CSA to act quickly, effectively or at all.

I accept that the new rules introduced last year are an improvement. However, introducing them is like giving someone a sticking plaster to deal with a broken leg. They have failed to deal with the underlying core problems of the CSA. Tinkering at the edges is not good enough; we need a complete overhaul of the entire system. Until we get that overhaul, I fear that Members of Parliament's postbags will continue to be filled with letters, and their surgeries filled with mothers, fathers and children who are being short-changed by the system. Those people deserve better.