Ok. Well its seems the challenge for this evening – courtesy of Rob Newman in comments – is to take a more positive view of the issue of Child Support and suggest workable alternatives to the current system; or at least some sort of proactive approach to solving this problem.
Where do I start?
Well how about with the question “do I support the abolition of the CSA?� - Yes, absolutely.
It has had thirteen years to get it right and failed at every turn - if the CSA were a private company it would have gone to the wall a long time ago, so why should we continue to prop up an obviously failing ‘enterprise’ any longer than is necessary to put together a replacement?
If, as Tony Blair has suggested, Labour is at its best when it is at its most radical, then why not try a radical solution, take whatever lessons we can learn for the CSA’s failure and start again. What does it actually cost us as a party? An admission that not even we could put right a system we inherited from the previous Tory administration? One that hardly a paragon of competence itself.
Of what real consequence is that?
On the political Richter scale barely a ripple of mild embarrassment.
We make a quick ‘mea culpa’ for not acting sooner, blame the Tories for handing us a system so structurally flawed that it was only a matter of time before it collapsed – lets face it, its takes real genius to contrive a system where everyone loses, but that was what we were handed - and move on before it’s too late to implement radical reforms in this Parliament. It may mean limping along with the current system for 2-3 more years but what of it – the state it’s in it can’t get much worse than it is already.
Where do we start?
Well, the basic principle that absent fathers should contribute financially to the upkeep of their children – where possible – stands. I say ‘where possible’ as can’t pay is can’t pay however you look at it, and there are and always will be those who, due to personal circumstances, simply cannot afford to pay without being driven into poverty themselves. You can’t get blood out of stone however much you try, so why waste precious time and resources trying.
Next lets try to define and scope the problem properly – which means that for the time being we forget about the stereotypical ‘deadbeat dads’. We know there are some who will try to buck the system and avoid their responsibilities and will only respond to enforcement – but these people make up only a portion of those who currently don’t pay and won’t pay. Instead lets try to identify and understand the many and varied reasons for non-payment which arise amongst fathers who would and could pay, if only they believed the system was fair and worked for their and their children’s interests.
The fact is that many absent fathers, even those who do pay, view the current system as being unfair and unjust to a degree not seen since the Poll Tax and for markedly the same reasons that that tax was widely hated – because was seen to be crude, arbitrary and because it failed to take into account people’s individual circumstances and to run contrary to the principle that people should be taxed according to their ability to pay. The Poll Tax was seen to be regressive and not progressive taxation, hence the widespread opposition it attracted.
Why is the current system perceived to be unfair?
Well that is the first thing we need to find out and understand properly.
There is no simple answer to question, certainly not one that can be readily systematised for ease of clerical administration. The majority of answers that come back will be ones that broadly defy bureaucratic solutions and require a more personal - and personalised - set of solutions.
What needs to be understood is what kinds of thing happen when relationships fail and how that impacts on all concerned; father, mother and child(ren) alike – as what happens in these situations will affect the extent to which any solutions will be perceived to fair or otherwise.
To give an obvious, but often overlooked example of what I mean here, much of the debate in recent years around Child Support has centred on the financial impact that a failed relationship has on the mother and child(ren) – very little thought is given to the situation that the father may be in at the same time. In fact all too frequently there is an assumption that the father simply moves one and gets on with the life with little real difficulty.
But how true is that? Often in that situation, the fact that mother remains the main caregiver of any children from the failed relationship means that she retains possession or occupancy of the family home and a large portion of the families’ possessions and material assets. A relationship breakdown may leave the parent with whom the children live, and whose opportunities to earn an income by working may suddenly become curtailed by their parental responsibilities, in a cash-poor situation, but in terms of the division of family wealth they remain, relatively-speaking asset-rich by comparison with the parent who leaves the family home and incurs the costs of starting afresh and trying to set up a new home, who may be cash-rich but asset-poor, at least to begin with.
Nowhere does the present system take this into account – indeed it actually, and deliberately, operated against just such situations by overruling and removing the practice of one-off settlements, which often involved the parent who left the family home paying off the mortgage – or their full remaining share of the mortgage – leaving the other parent in sole ownership of the property, in return for a reduction in or waiver on further maintenance payments. Clean-break agreements are not an option open to everyone, but for some, prior to the advent the CSA, they represented the best possible or preferred solution and the removal of this option did cause considerable resentment.
Access issues also impact considerably on perceptions of the CSA and the system it is required to implement. There are certainly cases in which one parent may be justified, due to prior domestic violence and abuse, in refusing access to children to the other. There are also situations in which such a denial of access rights in unjustified, where it occurs arbitrarily – as in situations where the break-up was acrimonious and the child(ren) become a ‘weapon’ in the ongoing battle between their parents – or where it happens for other unjust reasons; because a new partner resents the presence of the absent parent and wants all contact broken or even, sadly, for more sinister reasons as can arise where a step-parent becomes abusive and access is denied to hide this from the absent parent.
Absent parents who want a relationship with their child(ren) but who are denied access to them without good cause are quite naturally going to be resentful of a system which demands that they pay for child(ren)s’ upkeep but fails to uphold their lawful access rights.
Then there is the ‘black economy’ in maintenance payments, whether in cash or in kind – as when the absent parent pays nothing through the system but pays for clothes, shoes and other expenses relating to the child(ren) ‘on the side’. Do we have any idea of the extent to which this goes on or how much is actually being paid unofficially and outside the system to avoid the benefits claw-back, which takes money from maintenance payments to repay the government for any welfare benefits paid to the care-giving parent?
I’ve certainly not seen any such figures.
These any many other factors impact on the current level of non-payment because they create the perception that the system is unfair and loaded against the absent parent – in the case of the benefits claw-back this is made worse by it creating the perception that the system is also unfair to the child who sees only a marginal financial benefit from maintenance payments – even amongst those who do currently pay
And crucially, these are all things that defy translation into simple sets of administrative rules, regulations and formulae that can be readily administered by a bureaucratic system.
As I said in my previous post, this is a people issue not a systems issue.
To deal with the problem of non-payment we first have to define, scope and understand the problem – putting everything down to the stereotypical ‘deadbeat dad’ gets us nowhere, just as blaming teenage mums for all the social ills of the world got the Tories nowhere when they were in office. Such a view offers us no solutions other than even more draconian enforcement regimes, which can only breed further resentment and heighten the perception that the system is unfair – it is ultimately self-defeating.
Noting that we need to scope and understand the problem necessarily limits any suggestions as to what a replacement system might look like – after all the right and proper way to approach the design of such a system can only be to gather and analyse the evidence, understand the problem and design the new system to suit.
However, I would conjecture than any replacement system which could prove effective should have the characteristics of offering personalised solutions rather than take a crude one-size fits all approach and should be clearly linked to issues such as access, such that a parent who refuses access to children without justification, loses their right to maintenance payments. It should also be centred on delivering maximum benefit to the child, and not towards maximising the recovery of benefit payments by the government. It needs to be fair and offer clear incentives for absent parents to take on and live up to their responsibilities – only if it does that can punitive enforcement measures against the won’t pays be justified.
As such I would suspect that a replacement system would be largely arbitrative and not purely systematic – much as the old system in which courts dealt with maintenance issues was. It would seek to take the personal and financial circumstance of both parents fully in account and, where possible, mediate a voluntary agreement on maintenance – only enforcing its view where no such agreement can be reached.
This may be more time consuming and resource heavy – in terms of people – than the current bureaucratic system, but if it delivers fair solutions, in which all those who can pay do pay then its trade-off that will be well worth it.
Beyond that, it is difficult to say clearly how such a system would look – not a return to courts and lawyers certainly but one that recaptures much of flexibility of that approach without the same degree of overheads – something akin to an informal tribunal-based approach.
That leaves only the thorny subject of collection – for those who do pay, the simplest and least bureaucratic method would seem to me to use what’s available already – cash payments are unreliable and difficult to regulate but for most people on a regular income who have a bank account a transfer by standing order should be straightforward enough. I doubt the banks would have any objection to that.
For people who are self-employed or on an irregular income things are somewhat trickier, and will require a greater degree of manual intervention - but again this is largely an issue of the variability of income and therefore of the amount due which is merely a matter of making the right adjustment and moving the cash from A to B – now I know the CSA finds this horrible difficult for what seems to be no good reason at all – banks can certainly move money around easily enough so why not the CSA?
Loathe as I am to consider it, maybe the matter of moving money around the system may be something best left to the private sector and to people, like banks, who already know how to handle financial transactions fairly efficiently – who knows? That’s really another scoping exercise.
There is one further option which deserves looking at and which could incentivise payments, and that’s payroll deduction. No I’m not going to try to cost this out, merely suggest a system that allows payments to be deducted from gross rather than nett pay – giving the paying parent a modest degree of tax relief on payments – is one that’s worth looking at and costing out.
In all this, there is a simple principle – those who pay voluntarily and without problems work out a lot cheaper to ‘administer’ than those who don’t – chasing payments is costly, time-consuming and inefficient so a system in which the majority pay voluntarily and without requiring compulsion or enforcement is better for everyone in the long run.
I’m not suggesting here that anything of what I’ve written is panacea – this is one of those pieces that will be a ‘success’ – as far as I’m concerned - if it floats an idea or two, sparks a debate and starts people off thinking about alternative solutions – even if much of that debate is only about how unworkable some of these ideas are - rather than banging away incessantly at the trope of ‘deadbeat dads’ and demanding ever more costly and pointless enforcement measures which yield little or no positive results.
To throw one last idea into the pot for consideration – one interesting line of enquiry could be how a child support system might work in the context of a major reform to the welfare benefits such as the citizen’s basic income. One of the issues and, for some absent parents, points of contention when it comes to benefits claw-backs is that the whole amount of benefits paid to the care-giver (usually the mother) is taken into account when calculating deductions from maintenance payments – rightly or wrongly (I offer no opinion on this) some absent fathers have no problem with making payments they clearly identify as being for the child(ren) but are less happy about paying for the upkeep of their former partner – an issue which would not arise under CBI as the mother’s basic income is guaranteed and not subject to recovery from maintenance, ensuring that all maintenance is clearly and identifiably for the child(ren).
I’ve no doubt that this whole thing is far from perfect, but at least there are some ideas here, which is more than can be said for what’s been coming out of government for a long time.
