One of the previous government’s least noticed successes was to turn down the heat on child support. Gone were the lurid headlines, the horror stories, the angry and vengeful parents that had been a feature of the Child Support Agency’s (CSA) early years. Instead, quietly, doggedly, and after a number of false starts, Labour began to get a grip on the system, forcing the subject off the media agenda as a result. And while still far too few parents with care receive any maintenance for their children, and backlogs and old cases remain to be dealt with, the CSA’s performance began to improve.

Now the present government has been able to take advantage of this lower profile to propose a number of worrying changes. It was, of course, a Conservative government that first created the CSA in the early 1990s to cut public expenditure on lone parents by clawing back of benefits payments paid to parents who also got maintenance (“putting the Treasury first”, as the Child Poverty Action Group had it at the time). Today’s proposals are a nod to the failure of that original endeavour – instead they’ll keep cost down by discouraging many parents from going near the system at all.

Labour post 1997 gave considerable attention to child maintenance reform. Of course, in part this was because the system it inherited simply wasn’t working, with fewer than a third of parents with care receiving the full maintenance they were due. Non resident parents, meantime, complained bitterly, and sometimes with justification, of heavy handed, unreasonable and unjustified demands.

But Labour too saw a moral case for reform in the context of its ambition to eradicate child poverty – for it is children of lone parents who face the greatest poverty risk. Reliable maintenance payments, Labour argued, could help to reduce this poverty. And as an incentive to both parents to engage with the system, over time Labour moved to allow parents with care to retain all the maintenance they received from the other parent to spend on the children – a stark reversal of the Conservative government’s objective to reduce the cost to the public purse.

Labour also attempted to reduce confrontation within the system, encouraging voluntary arrangements by establishing the Choices programme to help parents reach their own agreements, backed up by the new Child Maintenance and Enforcement Commission, CMEC. And while it has to be said that the successes were modest, nonetheless Labour believed that the overall impact of the measures taken would be to reduce child poverty by 50,000 children by 2010/11.

But in a little noticed government response to a select committee inquiry last year, the present government now says, surprisingly, that child maintenance has little impact on child poverty. CMEC meanwhile is being abolished in the bonfire of the quangos, with the administration of child support once more to be placed in-house in DWP. Then last week, more or less unheralded, Ministers published a green paper on the future of the child maintenance system, which makes quite explicit that the statutory system of maintenance that had first been created by the Conservatives, much modified by Labour, is now to be seen as a residual solution only for a minority of families who cannot make their own maintenance arrangements, and that supporting families and relationships rather than tackling child poverty are the guiding objectives.

No one could argue with the government’s ambitions to improve and integrate advice and support for separating families (though cutting legal aid for family cases hardly goes with the grain of the green paper’s goal). Nor can routeing parents to mediation where this could be helpful be faulted, and the green paper is right to highlight reducing parental conflict as good for children. It’s also right that good quality contact with both parents is usually in the best interests of children – though the child’s welfare must remain paramount in any contact decision, something which the green paper somewhat casually overlooks.

But there’s little recognition in the green paper of the importance of regular, reliable maintenance payments to provide financial support to parents with care. Indeed insofar as maintenance payments are valued, the green paper appears to suggest it’s because they help improve contact (a potentially dangerous confusion of cause and effect).

And most worrying, and the true driver for the government’s proposals, is the suggestion that parents in future will face payment of a fee to access the statutory child maintenance scheme. Ministers believe this will act as incentive to private arrangements. But in a return full circle to where the Tories first started, it will also of course cut costs to the public purse.

The reality is that it is the most vulnerable parents who are most likely to be reliant on a statutory system, and fee-charging will deter some from accessing the financial support that could make such a difference to them and their kids. Some will settle for informal, stop-go and inadequate arrangements, not least for the sake of a bit of peace. Others will simply forego any financial support from the other parent and drop out of the system – hardly helping to promote parental responsibly, as the government says it desires.

An upfront application fee will undoubtedly discourage many from claiming, and deducting a change for maintenance collected will reinforce the sense that the government once again wants to put the Treasury first. While Ministers may believe the impact of changes to child maintenance on child poverty will be minimal, the hardship that results for those families affected will harm their children’s wellbeing, and risk increased damage to their long-term outcomes.

Ironically, Labour’s success in taking the political heat out of the system means these proposals will likely face little debate. Yet the long run effect is as likely to weaken as strengthen parental responsibility, and more children face poverty as a result. A full debate of these plans is urgently needed, and the best interests of children must lie at its heart.

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