CSA staff cuts condemned

Up to 2,000 members of staff from the Child Support Agency could lose their jobs over the next two years, according to new figures.

Under the Child Maintenance and Other Payments Bill, which enters the Commons for its second reading  on Wednesday, the CSA will be scrapped and replaced by the Child Maintenance and Enforcement Commission (CMEC).

The Bill gives CMEC, to be established next year, more power to make absent parents pay for their children.

It includes measures to impose curfews, remove passports and change the way payments are calculated, and there are also proposals to "name and shame" parents who refuse to pay by posting their details online.

But the extent of the planned cuts, obtained through a Parliamentary answer, have been condemned as "insane" by the Liberal Democrats.

Speaking before being reshuffled to another post, pensions spokesman David Laws said: "This 'son of CSA' is doomed to fail unless the government changes course rapidly.

"Daft gimmicks will win cheap headlines, but won't have the slightest impact on performance.

"These planned cuts are insane when the agency continues to have vast backlogs of unprocessed cases. The risk is that the new agency will inherit a complete mess from the CSA, and will never get on top of its new tasks.

"The government was told that the new agency must not be crippled by the problems of the old – but this is precisely what is going to happen."

Calling for the collection of child maintenance to be transferred to HMRC, he warned the government would also "run into huge problems" by using out-of-date statistics which "could stop people paying".