MPs condemn CSA failings

Government attempts to reform the child support system have been described as the "greatest public administration disaster of recent times".

A report by the Commons public accounts committee blamed poor project management, a failure to deal effectively with IT suppliers, and poor financial management at both the Department of Work and Pensions and the Child Support Agency.

Committee chairman Edward Leigh said the government would have to keep "an iron grip" on the Child Maintenance and Enforcement Commission when it replaced the CSA next year.

The agency was established in 1993 and by October last year one in four of the applications it had received since 2003 were still waiting to be cleared.

In the same year there was a backlog of 250,000 cases, £3.5bn in maintenance had not been collected, with 60 per cent deemed uncollectible, and in 2005-06 a total of 55,000 complaints were received.

In 2003 the government introduced reforms to the system, but the report found them to have been ambitious and unrealistic.

New IT and telephone systems carried a high level of risk because of their size and complexity, and had been attempted when the agency was already struggling with a substantial business restructuring, the report said.

"The reform of the Child Support Agency has been one of the greatest public administration disasters of recent times," Leigh said.

"The agency threw huge sums of money at a new IT system which was intended to underpin the reforms.

"The Department for Work and Pensions never really knew what it was doing in dealing with the contractors EDS and the system was a turkey from day one.

"Three years after it was introduced, it still had 500 defects and staff confidence has been seriously damaged.

"The department also spent £91m on bringing in external advisers but there are no records of where more than a third of this money went."

In February 2006 a new chief executive, Stephen Geraghty, put together a plan to tackle the backlog of cases, but by the end of the year the government had decided to replace the agency with the new commission.

Leigh said: "It took 13 years of failure for the department to reach the conclusion that the agency was not fit for purpose. During this time, thousands of children suffered; as thousands of absent parents have neglected their duties.

"In 2008 the Child Maintenance and Enforcement Commission will replace the CSA. But it is by no means clear how this will benefit citizens or regain the confidence of those the agency was intended to help.

"The government must keep an iron grip on this new organisation to ensure that the lessons have been learned from the CSA debacle."

The committee's warning has been echoed by Mark Serwotka, the general secretary of the Public and Commercial Services Union.

"To avoid the child support reforms simply becoming a re-branding exercise, the government need to ensure that both CMEC and the CSA are properly resourced and that staff have the tools to do the job," he said.

On Wednesday the government paved the way for the creation of CMEC with a second reading debate on the Child Maintenance and Other Payments Bill.

Work and pensions secretary Peter Hain said the body would mark a clean break with the past.

"We know that previous reforms have not worked. That is why we are replacing the
CSA with a radically different child maintenance system," he said.

"We have learnt lessons from the past. The new system will lift children out of poverty, give power and choice to parents, enforce
responsibilities, and deliver value for taxpayers."