Child maintenance: here we go again?

Child maintenance, and specifically recovery of payments from non-resident parents, is up for review again.

Yesterday the coalition Government published a consultation (click here for news item; responses due by 7 April) on a further overhaul to the system that only two years ago saw the inefficient and unloved Child Support Agency evolve into the Child Maintenance and Enforcement Commission. And although the successor body hasn't been as constantly in the firing line of public criticism as the CSA, the shocking figures were revealed that it still costs us as taxpayers £460m a year for it to collect and forward payments of £1.1bn, and has £4bn of arrears to deal with – not that there is much prospect of most of those ever being collected, I suspect.

One would hope that the new plans are at least moving in the right direction to achieve a more efficient system. People will initially be advised by a charity or voluntary body (what network will be put in place to enable that to happen remains to be seen), and then move on if necessary – i.e. if they can't sort things out for themselves – into one of three levels in the system. These involve simply getting an initial, non-binding, assessment of what might be payable; going to the stage of a formal order, payment of which is then arranged privately; and only if none of that works, going though the official collection and distribution process.

A one-off fee will be charged unless ongoing enforcement is required, in which case both parties will share some form of levy. The initial fee is promised to be modest – though elsewhere we are of course seeing ever-greater demands for many forms of public service to pay their way courtesy of the user, and we should be alert to a "thin end of the wedge" approach developing here.

Cases with a domestic violence background will be treated as special and fast tracked – but are they really the only ones that might need special measures? I'm not sure but lawyers in the field should make ther voices heard if they think there should be others.

I wonder, however, whether we are still looking at the problem from the wrong end. The original motive behind setting up the CSA was to cut down on benefit payments to single parents where an absent other was not paying their share. A vast structure was set up that took cases out of court and into a bureaucratic mess, compounded by an IT disaster. The compulsion has since been removed, but not, it seems, the cost or the arrears.

You might think that an even less bureaucratic solution would be to leave parties to make their own arrangements, and only resort to official help if they need a lawyer and the prospect of legal action, just like in the old days – except, of course, that south of the border they are proposing to cut legal aid from all such cases, domestic violence apart, and obviously feel they need to put a (hopefully cut price) substitute in place. It would be interesting to know what the comparative costs would actually work out at. The current annual cost of the CMEC after all exceeds Ken Clarke's entire target for legal aid savings, with all the metaphorical bloodletting those involve, by over £100m.