New body to toughen up child support

Plans to replace the troubled Child Support Agency with a tough new body have been set out by the work and pensions secretary.

John Hutton unveiled a white paper on Wednesday which will see the current system scrapped and replaced with a powerful new Child Maintenance and Enforcement Commission (CMEC).

The new body will be smaller and will offer a simpler way of collecting child maintenance.

Hutton told the Commons he will also seek more powers to deal with parents who repeatedly fail to pay maintenance - such as suspending passports, confiscating driving licences and imposing curfews.

And the white paper set out plans to allow the naming and shaming of some parents.

Those who have had successful court action taken against them will be displayed on a website.

Hutton said: "The commission will be given extra powers to recover maintenance from those who repeatedly fail to pay.

"This will include the imposition of new curfews and the surrendering of passports, piloting mandatory withholding of wages as the first means of collecting maintenance and exploring the financial services sector new powers to collect maintenance from accounts held by financial institutions.

"We will remove the requirement to apply to the courts for a liability order before taking enforcement action and we will take powers to recover debt from deceased estates.

"In future I expect CMEC will charge the non resident parent for its services and that we will publicise the names of non resident parents who are successfully prosecuted or have a successful application made against them in court".

Hutton said the government aims to establish CMEC, which will be led by a child maintenance commissioner, in 2008.

It will aim to give more support to parents who want to make their own arrangements.

Those on benefits will no longer be forced to use the agency.

And legislation should also be changed to require both parents' names to be registered following the birth of their child, Hutton added.

At present only the mother's name must go on the birth certificate but Hutton said making a record of the father's name compulsory would help future enforcement of maintenance payments.

The existing Child Support Agency (CSA) has been dogged by a series of problems since it was set up 13 years ago.

Overpayments to parents have left a total of £3.5bn still being owed to the agency.

But Hutton rejected calls for the debt to be written off, insisting he believed only £50m was irrecoverable.

Responding to the proposals, the Conservatives said it would be 2010 before a new system was in place, leaving 1.4 million families to deal with the CSA and its problems for more than three further years.

Tory work and pensions spokesman Philip Hammond said: "The government can talk all it wants about enforcement, but unless it fixes the root cause of the problem, assessing an absent parent's income effectively, then it is simply building a house on sand."