Despite the fuss, it must be better to keep fathers in the picture

As the Welfare Reform Bill makes its way through the House of Lords, the controversy surrounding those elements relating to the proposed reforms of the child-maintenance system shows no sign of abating either inside or outside parliament.

The campaign against the changes has been spearheaded by organisations as diverse as the single-parent lobby groups, child-poverty campaigners, the TUC and the Church of England and has, largely, portrayed the proposals as being an attack on single parents that will drive more children into poverty. So pervasive has been the campaign that it is easy to lose sight of the primary intentions that lie behind the changes.

At the heart of the proposed reforms is a philosophy that families, themselves, are best placed to determine the arrangements that will work in their own individual circumstances, coupled with an intention to encourage the involvement of both parents in their children’s lives after divorce or separation.

In doing so, the government is explicit in its desire to focus on joint parenting and empowering parents to move away from costly, adversarial and imposed solutions.

On the face of it, such aspirations would not appear to be particularly contentious. The Coalition’s stated aim of rebalancing the system ‘from one that can exacerbate the differences, drawing parents down an adversarial route, to one where families are encouraged and empowered to resolve issues’ would, one might presume, draw widespread support. However, this has been far from the case. So why the controversy?

Under the S6 of the Child Support Act 1991, where a parent with the main day-to-day care of a child made a claim for income support, jobseekers’ allowance or other income-based benefits, this was treated as a mandatory application for child support. In essence, large numbers of parents, who had no need or wish to be, became trapped within an inflexible, unwieldy and bureaucratic system that often failed to deliver and, worse, tended to increase the tension between parents as they went through separation.

With the repeal of S6, as part of the Child Maintenance and Other Payments Act (2008), all parents became free to make their own private arrangements for child maintenance. Where the parent with the main day-to-day care of a child (referred to in the legislation as a parent with care) was unable, or did not wish to make a private arrangement, they could choose to make a claim through the Statutory Maintenance Service which has the power to pursue and enforce maintenance payments.

The current proposals build on the changes brought about under the 2008 legislation in two major ways. Firstly, they require parents to demonstrate that they have attempted to make a private, family-based arrangement before they are able to access the statutory scheme. Secondly, they introduce charges for access to, and use of, the statutory scheme.

For parents who choose to make a statutory application, an up-front application charge of around £100 will be made. For parents on benefits, this reduces to around £50 with £20 of this paid up front and the remainder paid in instalments. A calculation-only service will also be available at around £20 to £25. It is this introduction of charges that has caused the greatest furore, with campaigners suggesting that it is an attack on the rights of single parents to receive what is due to them.

The introduction of charges stems partially from the government’s desire to provide value for money for the tax payer. However, the real driver behind charging is to change the environment in which the statutory scheme is seen as the default maintenance option. Sir David Henshaw, in his report that precipitated the 2008 Act, argued that charging would ‘contribute to the objectives of the new system by incentivising private arrangements, which can be more successful, helping child welfare through increased compliance...’

The campaign against charging has argued that upfront charging will reduce the numbers of parents who use the statutory scheme and, therefore, the numbers of parents with effective arrangements in place. However, the evidence collected by Henshaw suggested the opposite to be true. He concluded that:

‘parents who are able to should be encouraged and supported to make their own arrangements. Such arrangements tend to result in higher satisfaction and compliance and allow individual circumstances to be reflected.’

His recommendation that the government should encourage parents to make their own private arrangements was, therefore, based firmly on the evidence that these produce better outcomes and greater compliance than the statutory system and that, as a result, more children would benefit from effective maintenance arrangements, not fewer.

Much has also been made of the proposals to charge parents as a contribution to the ongoing cost to the state of collecting and enforcing payments. It has been argued that this, too, will reduce the number of effective maintenance arrangements and will significantly contribute to child poverty. However, it is worth getting this into proportion.

Based on current figures, at the lower end of the proposed percentage charges, 16 per cent of parents with care would pay no more than 35p per week (less than the cost of three standard SMS text messages) and 40 per cent of parents with care would pay no more than 70p per week. And, if the parent with care didn’t prevent the money being paid through the Maintenance Direct system, where money is transferred without involving the state, even this modest amount wouldn’t be payable.

Of course it is necessary to ensure that any charging mechanism should not make the statutory scheme so expensive as to effectively remove it as a choice for those parents who may need it. There is a good case to be made for the burden of the charges to be borne by both parents and the government could consider introducing a sliding scale of upfront application charges for poorer parents who are not in receipt of qualifying benefits.

Nevertheless, charging is an important mechanism for encouraging parents to move away from an automatic application through the statutory scheme and, instead, to consider making collaborative, family-based arrangements.

Perhaps the most significant change that the proposals would introduce is, curiously, also the one that has received the least attention: the establishment of a new integrated model of relationship and family support services that will help parents to deal with the practical and emotional issues that can get in the way of successful maintenance arrangements and wider issues such as parenting time agreements.

At last, we have a government that has recognised that the issues that prevent parents from making effective child maintenance arrangements are not necessarily directly associated with making financial provision for their children. The proposals take account of the fact that child maintenance is just one of a range of issues that parents face when they go through divorce or separation.

Rather than dealing with mainten-ance in isolation, the new support service will help parents to deal with wider issues, whether they are emotional or communications problems, or practical concerns around things like parenting time, housing, debt or work. This early-intervention approach that seeks to help parents build sustainable, collaborative post-separation parenting relationships is key to helping children adjust to life after separation and gives families the tools and strategies that they need to manage the lifetime of transitions that separation brings.

Such support services have the very real potential to bring lasting change for the countless families who experience divorce or separation. This respectful, gender-aware engagement could meet the different needs of mothers and fathers so that their personal experiences could be acknowledged and responded to in ways that promote the interests of children rather than upholding the individual rights of parents.

Perhaps this is why the proposals have drawn so much anger from the organisations that represent single par-ents. After all, they, and the organisations that represent non-resident fathers, are constituted around maximising the interests of the parents that they serve rather than the family as a whole.

So much of the campaign against the changes has relied on stereotypes and misrepresentations. It has sought to portray all non-resident parents as being the cause of family breakdown, of being unwilling to take financial responsibility for their children after separation and of being coercive in their dealings with the parent with care.

However, it simply is not the case that non-resident parents are any more likely to be the cause of the separation than the parent with care and it is not the case that the majority of non-resident parents attempt to evade their responsibilities after separation. Neither is it true that non-resident parents are any more likely to use coercive behaviour than parents with care.

The Department for Work and Pensions’ own statistics show that in only 17 per cent of cases does a parent refuse to make maintenance payments and that in almost twice as many cases, 33 per cent, the reason that there is no maintenance arrangement in place is because the parent with care does not want anything to do with the non-resident parent.

But what of the debate within parliament? After taking evidence, the House of Commons Work and Pensions Committee chose to recommend that non-resident parents should have money deducted from their salary or bank account, irrespective of how successfully their arrangements are working. An approach that is not only deeply flawed but is, in essence, punitive. Equally, the Committee’s recommendation, echoed in the Lords, to shift all of the burden of charging to the non-resident parent are based on the fallacy that it is only non-resident parents who are unwilling to make private arrangements for child maintenance.

Such approaches fail to learn the lessons from the failures of the Child Support Agency and would create more animosity between separating parents, lead to fewer successful arrangements, increase unnecessary bureaucracy and make the statutory system less effective for those who really need to use it.

It seems to me that child maintenance is, first and foremost, a private parenting decision and not the business of the state. Even before the changes, more than half the people currently in the statutory scheme say they would prefer to make a private arrangement if they were given the support to do so. Fewer cases in the statutory scheme will also mean a significantly better service for those who do need it.

Those organisations who campaign for the rights of single parents will continue to use the stereotype of the abandoned mum and the deadbeat dad to try and derail these proposals but it is imperative that those who have the responsibility for making legislation look beyond the rhetoric.

The lone-parent model of support to separated families has failed countless children over the last forty years. The government must hold its nerve in the face of the opposition to these changes because, surely, it is time to do things differently and the current proposals have the potential to transform the lives of families for generations to come.

Nick Woodall works on policy and development at the Centre for Separated Families.

Note: The terms ‘parent with care’ and ‘non resident parent’ have legal meaning only within the scope of the statutory maintenance scheme but are used more widely and carry cultural preconceptions about parental behaviour.