A parish smarter than the CSA

When forced in public to defend a difficult position or an awkward policy, politicians often seek recourse to history as a means of justifying themselves or securing mitigation. One example is the Department for Work and Pensions minister, James Plaskitt, who in January 2006 adopted this rhetorical manoeuvre when faced with the unenviable task of defending the record of the Child Support Agency before the House of Commons.

Quoting from the 1990 white paper in which the creation of the CSA had first been proposed, Mr Plaskitt reminded MPs that the previous system of child support had been fragmented, uncertain, slow and ineffective. Furthermore, he declared ‘sometimes an impression is created of a golden age of child maintenance before the CSA was set up. It is worth reminding ourselves that it never existed’.

As an historian of welfare, I have no quarrel with Mr Plaskitt’s assessment of child support policy in the 1980s. There is no shortage of policy experts — or, indeed, people who went through the system themselves — who would condemn the inadequate record of the courts in managing child maintenance in the immediate decades before the 1991 Child Support Act. Many other historians would also probably share Mr Plaskitt’s scepticism of an historical interpretation oriented around an apparent ‘golden age’.

Yet, as the government has finally published its keenly-awaited proposals for reform of the CSA, the minister’s confident pronouncement on the history of child maintenance begs further questions about this difficult area of social policy. Is it necessarily the case that things were always worse in the past? After all, how did historical communities deal with the problem of children born to unmarried and separated parents? Can a long-term historical perspective shed any useful light upon the CSA’s recent and troubled past, or this government’s current white paper for reform of the child support system?

The eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries present the most interesting point of comparison for the student of welfare and child support policy. These were unprecedented times. Contrary to the received wisdom that pre-marital sex was taboo, historical-demography has shown that around one quarter of all first births were born illegitimate — and another quarter were conceived outside of wedlock. Children born to unmarried parents were a small but significant feature of the demographic landscape. Under common law, a child born to such parents was deemed to be nullius filius or ‘nobody’s child’, since no apparent responsibility was placed upon putative fathers to provide for maintenance. But if so, who was responsible for the care of such children? Mothers? The local community? And did fathers have any role to play?

In fact, canon law had long placed an obligation upon both a mother and father (whether married or not) to care for and maintain their children. With the decline of the church courts in the sixteenth century, the secular authorities were forced to step in to deal with all welfare-related issues across the land. The Elizabethan ‘poor law’ placed local communities under an obligation to care for their own poor, even allowing for the raising of a local property tax — the poor rate — to pay for this form of social welfare. Alongside the sick, the elderly and the unemployed, unmarried mothers soon fell under a statutory framework of welfare.

Whilst this sixteenth-century legislation demanded that both parents of illegitimate children be responsible for their maintenance it granted, in effect, unmarried mothers a right to welfare assistance. By the eighteenth century, the law had evolved to recognise unmarried mothers as the likely primary carer, and explicitly placed fathers under an obligation to financially maintain the child. This system was administered by local parishes under the jurisdiction of magistrates, and according to the terms of so-called affiliation orders, a father would be expected to pay to the parish a sum ‘weekly and every week … for and towards the keeping, sustentation and maintenance of the said bastard child’.

This meant that by the early-nineteenth century an unmarried mother could be receiving a cash dole of between 1s 6d and 2s 6d per week — a sum that compares favourably to a male agricultural labourer’s wage of around 10s weekly. And the mother was entitled to receive this sum whether the father paid or not — the difference being made up from the rates.

This expectation of paternal financial responsibility exemplifies a very particular and ancient role placed upon the putative fathers of illegitimate children. It also shows that the state (in the form of the parish) has long been centrally involved in matters of child support.

Such parallels between then and now are even more instructive when looking at the comparative performance of the poor law and the modern CSA. The most infamous failing of the agency has been its inability to enforce the payment obligations of non-resident fathers. The cumulative debt owed to the CSA amounts to some £3.5bn. In 2004-05, its cash compliance rate — the proportion of the sum owed by non-resident parents that was actually collected by the agency — was around 70 per cent, but it has at times been as low as 40 per cent.

By contrast, some parishes in poor law England were able to recoup more than 90 per cent of the value of payments made to mothers from putative fathers. Not all parishes were so successful, particularly in parts of the country suffering from the problem of structural unemployment in agriculture. But in localities such as West Yorkshire parish authorities pursued the enforcement of paternal responsibility vigorously and successfully. The discretionary and flexible legal framework allowed the parish to employ both negotiation and the threat of imprisonment to coax maintenance payments from putative fathers. A witness before an 1831 House of Lords Select Committee reported how his parish managed its child support policy:

‘It is one of our standing rules, if a person ... does not obey the laws of bastardy, to regard no expense; we will have them if we follow them from one end of the kingdom to another. It is with great difficulty I have persuaded the parish to come into that, as the most economical system. We advertize them, and take every means to have them brought forward. We formerly had very great inconvenience this way, but we have now hardly any refractory subjects.’

The CSA failed because its bureaucratic and inflexible systems were incapable of adapting to the complexities of managing child support. Crucially, it failed to earn legitimacy in the eyes of those who were compelled to use it. As the new Child Support Bill takes shape ministers would do well to look to history for more than just a rhetorical escape route. Whilst a glance at the history of the poor law might show that there has never have been a ‘golden age’ of child maintenance, and that the government is right to focus upon enforcement as a key area of reform, it would also caution against underestimating the necessity of the central role long played by the state in the effective operation of child support policy.

Dr Thomas Nutt is a Research Fellow at Magdalene College, Cambridge and a member of the Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure. He is the co-editor of ‘Illegitimacy in Britain, 1700-1920’ (Palgrave Macmillan, 2005) and ‘Narratives of the poor in eighteenth-century Britain’ (Pickering and Chatto, 2006).

An expanded version of this article is available on www.historyandpolicy.org.