Child maintenance - DWP publishes White Paper describing the Government's new approach

The Government has announced a number of changes to reform the child maintenance system. The White Paper is entitled "A New System of Child Maintenance" and its key proposals are to

• establish a new organisation called the Child Maintenance and Enforcement Commission (C-MEC) which will replace the Child Support Agency and have responsibility for all aspects of the new child maintenance system, including providing parents with information and guidance to help them make their own arrangements and the calculation, collection and enforcement of maintenance
  
  
• help parents to make an active choice about their child maintenance by removing the requirement for parents with care who claim benefits to be treated as applying for child maintenance
  
  provide parents with quality information and guidance to help them make informed decisions about how to make their own child maintenance arrangements or move to the new system
  
  
• significantly increase the amount of maintenance that parents with care on benefit can keep before it affects the level of benefits they receive
  
  
• simplify and streamline the child maintenance assessment process: for example, using latest available tax year information as the basis for calculating child maintenance
  
  
• improve the collection and enforcement processes sending out a clear signal that non payment of maintenance will not be tolerated. This includes
  
  
  • enforcing the surrender of a non-resident parent's passport, or
    
    
  • imposing a curfew on a non-resident parent who fails to pay maintenance, and
    
    
  • removing the requirement to apply to the courts for a Liability Order and replace it with a swifter more effective administrative process
    
    

• increase efforts to collect and manage debts
  
  
• help wider government policy on supporting families by moving to a position where both parents names are always registered on a birth certificate unless it would be unreasonable to do so.

The new organisation and the changes to the rules will be introduced in stages over several years. After the parliamentary Bill to reform the child maintenance system is approved, C-MEC will be put in place with statutory authority during 2008/09 and will take responsibility for existing Child Support Agency operations. The full transition will not be complete until 2012/13.

The White Paper discusses the current methods that are used to enforce the payment of child maintenance and considers a number of further measures, as mentioned above. Extensive use is already made of Deduction from Earnings Orders (DEOs) and around 22% of the CSA's caseload with a positive maintenance liability has such an order in place, with a 76% compliance rate. They could, in future, be used even more frequently and research is to be undertaken to see whether the US approach of using DEOs as the automatic collection method would be appropriate here, even if the non-resident parent were willing to pay by another method such as Direct Debit. There is, however, no suggestion that any changes are planned to the way in which DEOs are operated by employers.

A further option under consideration, subject to necessary legislation, is for C-MEC to authorise financial institutions, such as banks, building societies and pension providers, to pay maintenance owed from a non-resident parent's account. Such a measure would be aimed at the self-employed and those non-resident parents for whom a DEO is either ineffective or inapplicable.

...UK Payroll News - Latest

Further information:
A new system of child maintenance

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