The controversial Child Support Agency (CSA) is to be replaced by C-MEC, a body with greatly enhanced powers to force non-resident parents to pay child maintenance.
C-MEC, the Child Maintenance and Enforcement Commission, will be able to: blacklist defaulting parents from taking out loans and mortgages; take money out of bank accounts; impose curfews; and force parents to surrender their passports. It will have powers to charge errant parents for the cost of tracking them down.
The reforms, outlined in the Child Maintenance and Other Payments Bill, is an attempt to curb the failures of the CSA, which has an overall debt mountain of £3.5bn including about £760m from debts so long-standing they can no longer be legally enforced.
However, family lawyers are campaigning to amend the proposed reforms. Resolution’s child support committee chair Kim Fellowes, a director at Newcastle firm Dickinson Dees LLP, says Resolution is concerned that, while the government is keen to reduce administrative burdens by encouraging parents to agree their own private arrangements, the proposed reforms contain nothing that would enable parents to enforce these arrangements.
She says it is unclear where parents could go to get help on working out arrangements.
The group points out that there is no information on how historic debt, which can no longer be legally enforced, will be collected and if compensation will be paid to those parents who have lost these maintenance payments through no fault of their own.
Resolution also wants divorce courts to be given the power to cover arrangements for child support payments where they are already involved.
Fellowes adds: “Two versions of the CSA have failed thousands of children and their parents to date and the government’s latest plans look set to continue that trend.”
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