Child Support - September 2010

The shocking figures revealing the large sums of money outstanding from absent parents for the care of their children came as no surprise to me. It is one of the most depressing aspects of my job. I would say that of the constituents who visit my ‘surgeries’, however the problem presents –whether it be debt, housing, schooling or whatever – scratch the surface, and you find that for 7 out of ten the real problem is family breakdown.

We set up the Child Support Agency to take up the job of chasing up absent parents and getting the money out of them. It proved a bureaucratic nightmare. When I was first elected, complaints against the Child Support Agency made up more than half my post bag. I sat on the committee charged with drawing up the legislation to reform the Agency.  Our belief was that so much effort went into assessing the ability of absent parents to pay up, that there was insufficient resources left to actually chase them and make them pay it.  So we went for a system that placed a general rule of thumb based on a percentage of the absent parent’s income irrespective of individual circumstance, in the hope that this simplicity would enable the agency to redeploy all its effort into collecting payments rather than calculating what they should be.

The reform was thwarted by a complete disaster in the form of a new and incredibly expensive computer system from which the Agency is still trying to recover.

Whenever and however we manage to sort the administration for enforcing payments from absent parents for the maintenance of their children, actually the problem comes down to individuals. Some parents shirk the responsibility of providing for their children. Even worse, many parents continue to prosecute a war against their former partners and they use the children as weapons.  Ultimately the cause is wickedness and not administrative failure. Until we, as a society, are prepared to punish such wickedness with the severity that it properly deserves, the taxpayer will be left picking up the bills.