Led by a new Commissioner for Child Maintenance, C-MEC aims to deliver a simpler and more effective way of assessing, collecting and enforcing child maintenance, according to the proposals set out in the Government's White Paper last week.
Work and pensions secretary John Hutton said, 'Its main focus will be on enforcing maintenance where parents cannot agree. But in future, we will do all we can to help parents reach their own agreements.
'Our proposals to get visibly tougher on enforcement send out a clear signal that non-payment of maintenance will not be tolerated.'
Current position The CSA was launched in April 1993 but has since gained a reputation as a bureaucratic scandal. It has been inundated by complaints - more than 1,000 in the first year alone - both from the parents with care who were not receiving money from their former partners, and from absent parents saying their maintenance payments were set too high.
A catalogue of disasters continued into 2003 when the CSA launched a new computer and telephone system, two years late and 56m over budget.
But later that year the Department of Work and Pensions announced that only 4 per cent of the 150,000 new applicants for payments had received any financial comeback (see 'Special report', 13 October 2005).
The CSA now has a backlog of 300,000 unresolved cases. Total arrears in uncollected maintenance are currently thought to amount to 3.5bn. It has recently come to light that the CSA has been using private companies to collect unpaid money. Through this method it has recovered around 320,000 which it would not otherwise have gathered.
Chief executive of the charity One Parent Families, Chris Pond, has urged the Government to put greater energy into collecting arrears more quickly.
He said, 'The Government must step up measures to collect the mountain of debt legally owed to parents, largely due to the past failures of the CSA.
'The agency's own figures show that it is a collectable debt, after deducting bad and doubtful debt, of 1.4bn. Yet in the next three years, it plans to collect just 100m - a mere 7 per cent of this amount.'
Key proposals The new scheme aims to give parents more choices to make decisions on the best child maintenance arrangements for them. Key proposals in the White Paper include:
* Establishing C-MEC, with responsibility for all aspects of the new child maintenance system, including providing parents with information and guidance to help them make their own arrangements and the calculation, collection and enforcement of maintenance
* Helping parents to make an active choice about their child maintenance by removing the requirement for parents who claim benefits to be treated as applying for child maintenance
* Providing parents with information and guidance to help them make informed decisions about how to make their own child maintenance arrangements or move to the new system
* Significantly increasing the amount of maintenance that parents with care who are on benefit can keep before it affects the level of benefits they receive
* Simplifying the child maintenance assessment process; for example, using latest available tax-year information as the basis of calculating child maintenance obligations
* Sending out a clear signal that non-payment of maintenance will not be tolerated. This includes enforcing the surrender of a non-resident parent's passport or imposing a curfew on them if they fail to pay maintenance, and removing the requirement to apply to the courts for a Liability Order and replacing it with a swifter, more effective administrative process
* Increasing efforts to collect and manage debts
* Moving to a position where both parents' names are always registered on a child's birth certificate, unless it would be unreasonable to do so.
Timescale The new organisation and the changes to the rules will be introduced in several stages over a few years. The process will start with a Bill being introduced to Parliament in 2007 to reform the child maintenance system.
C-MEC will take over from the CSA in 2008 and it is intended that all clients will be on a single set of rules and managed by a single organisation by 2013.
Further information The White Paper, 'A New System of Child Maintenance', is available at www.dwp.gov.uk.
