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The child support redesign - Response of One Parent Families to the Government’s consultation on the report of Sir David Henshaw
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October 2006 - Introduction (download the full response below).
1. Since its inception in 1918, One Parent Families (OPF) has been dedicated to campaigning for equality of opportunity for one parent families and tackling the exclusion, poverty and prejudice they so often face. One of our founding objectives that we are still trying to achieve is the establishment of a successful child maintenance system which guarantees regular payments to parents with care and their children.
2. We welcomed the decision of the Secretary of State to order a fundamental rethink about the way the child support system operates, and to redesign it to make it fit for purpose. The Child Support Agency has lost the confidence of both parents with care and non-resident parents as a result of its poor levels of service, which have caused distress and financial hardship to many families. It has failed to deliver on the key objective of ensuring that more children in separated families receive maintenance, and has proved poor value for money.
3. We commend the Department for Work and Pensions for the open manner in which it is consulting on further child support reform, and do not underestimate the difficulties of many of the issues to be decided. We hope that this open consultative approach will continue as plans move to the Parliamentary stage and beyond. The current failure of the child support system has largely been one of delivery - including problems with CS2 and the complex telephony system, and shortcomings with the business model itself. Such matters do not lend themselves easily to parliamentary scrutiny and we recommend that the Department think hard about how it can incorporate the views and perspectives of users of the new system at the early design and planning stages for the new system.
4. This submission draws on lessons learned from a series of seminars on child support reform held by One Parent Families earlier this summer. Two important messages which emerged were firstly, that the general approach has to be broad brush. Child support is for the long-term. Therefore it is important to keep the government system as simple as possible and avoid "millimetre justice". Secondly, the key task of a child support system is to make non-resident parents pay, independent of whether the parent with care is poor or not. It must command support from all families and not just be focused on poor families.
5. We have set out to respond to the questions posed by the Department in its document 'A fresh start: child support redesign - the Government response to Sir David Henshaw'. We trust that further opportunities will be given at a future date to consider in greater detail the shape and organisation of the future model for child support.
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