A change to the Children Act is only the beginning

The increase in fatherlessness, the difficulties that many parents have in developing collaborative post separation parenting relationships and an increase in inter-generational family breakdown are largely rooted in the cultural changes and political responses of the past and the way that those social policy changes have become embedded in current legislation, policy and practice.

The development of the Lone Parent Social Assistance Model, brought into being in the early seventies through the Finer Report on One Parent Families (1974), severed the dependency of mothers upon fathers after separation and, in essence, afforded them the same status as widows; effectively wedding separated mothers to the state.

This was accompanied by a cultural push to elevate the lone parent family and have it recognised and acknowledged as being of equal status to two parent families. Whilst this was, in part, motivated by the laudable desire to reduce the stigma experienced by mothers who were parenting alone, it also resulted in fathers being pushed out of their children’s lives. (Reading many of the feminist academics and campaigners shows that this initiative was also politically motivated.)

The Lone Parent Model effectively divides parents into the separate roles of carer and financial provider. Services developed around the Lone Parent Model are, consequently, configured to support one parent (the carer) to the exclusion of the other (the provider). The provider is often viewed as a problem and is recognised, not in any parenting sense, but only in relation to their capacity to pay child maintenance.

The creation of the Child Support Agency, whilst attempting to ‘divorce’ separated mothers from the state and ensure that fathers remained financially responsible for their children, further entrenched the division of roles and decreased the potential for collaboration between parents after divorce or separation.

Repeated generational family breakdown – as a result of children internalising their experience of being parented by one primary carer with the other distant or uninvolved, other than through the invisible payment of child maintenance – together with the championing of lone parenthood by single parent organisations, has resulted in family separation and lone parenting being seen as the norm and having little or no effect on children.

Services to support divorced and separated families have, quite logically, but also by design, developed in the shadow of the Lone Parent Model and, as a consequence, mirror its divisions, resulting in a workforce that is steeped in gender biased ideas about men’s and women’s behaviours and roles in family relationships, both before and after separation, and responds to these stereotypes in ways that increase the gap between parents and reduce the potential for collaboration.

The key piece of legislation affecting separating families who are going through the courts is the Children Act (1989), a gender neutral law which states that ‘when a court determines any question with respect to… the upbringing of a child… the child’s welfare shall be the court’s paramount consideration.’

However, working to this principle in an overarching gender biased, and often discriminatory, environment leads to gender biased outcomes (most often supporting a mother’s role as carer and relegating a father’s role to that of provider), thereby increasing the likelihood of dispute and reducing the potential for collaboration between parents.

In a nutshell, the problem with the Children Act is that operating gender neutral legislation in a gender biased environment produces inequality.

The government’s decision to include a clear legislative statement in the Act, establishing that the best interests of children are met through the maintenance of a relationship with both parents, that is regular and consistent in terms of parenting time and collaborative in terms of decision making is, therefore, extremely important and could prove to be the catalyst for significant change and begin to transform the environment in which parents make choices about children.

However, if the legislative statement is to bring about a truly different culture, it is critical that the workforce that engages with parents during and after separation understands and supports the needs of children to have a meaningful relationship with both their mother and father. This would require, amongst other things, wide scale gender awareness training and practitioners having a greater understanding of the issues that both mothers and fathers face after separation.

Unless family mediators, Cafcass officers, social workers, child support professionals, children’s centre staff and all the other individuals and agencies that parents come into contact with start to work outside the Lone Parent paradigm, children will continue to miss out on the vital relationships that allow them to grow and develop into psychologically secure and fulfilled adults. To that extent, a change to the Children Act, whilst hugely significant, is not the end, but only the beginning, of a process to improve post separation outcomes for children.

Why the governemnt has got it right on child maintenance reform

As the Welfare Reform Bill makes its way through the House of Lords, the controversy surrounding those elements relating to the proposed reforms of the child maintenance system shows no sign of abating either inside or outside Parliament.

The campaign against the changes has been spearheaded by organisations as diverse as the single parent lobby groups, child poverty campaigners, the TUC and the Church of England and has, largely, portrayed the proposals as being an attack on ‘single parents’ that will drive more children into poverty. So pervasive has been the campaign that it is easy to lose sight of the primary intentions that lie behind the changes.

At the heart of the proposed reforms is a philosophy that families, themselves, are best placed to determine the arrangements that will work in their own individual circumstances coupled with an intention to encourage the involvement of both parents in their children’s lives after divorce or separation. In doing so, the government is explicit in its desire to focus on joint parenting and empowering parents to move away from costly, adversarial and imposed solutions.

On the face of it, such aspirations would not appear to be particularly contentious. The Coalition’s stated aim of rebalancing the system ‘from one that can exacerbate the differences, drawing parents down and adversarial route, to one where families are encouraged and empowered to resolve issues’ would, one might presume, draw widespread support. However, this has been far from the case. So why the controversy?

Under the S6 of the Child Support Act 1991, where a parent with the main day-to-day care of a child made a claim for Income Support, Jobseekers Allowance or other income based benefits, this was treated as a mandatory application for child support. In essence, large numbers of parents, who had no need or wish to be, became trapped within an inflexible, unwieldy and bureaucratic system that often failed to deliver and, worse, tended to increase the tension between parents as they went through separation.

With the repeal of S6, as part of the Child Maintenance and Other Payments Act (2008), all parents became free to make their own private arrangements for child maintenance. Where the parent with the main day-to-day care of a child (referred to in the legislation as a Parent With Care) was unable, or did not wish to make a private arrangement, they could choose to make a claim through the Statutory Maintenance Service which has the power to pursue and enforce maintenance payments.

The current proposals build on the changes brought about under the 2008 legislation in two major ways. Firstly it requires parents to demonstrate that they have attempted to make a private, family based arrangement before they are able to access the statutory scheme and, secondly, it introduces charges for access to, and use of, the statutory scheme.

For parents who choose to make a statutory application, an upfront application charge of around £100 will be made. For parents on benefits, this reduces to around £50 with £20 of this paid upfront and the remainder paid in instalments. A calculation only service will also be available at around £20 to £25. It is this introduction of charges that has caused the greatest furore with campaigners suggesting that it is an attack on the rights of ‘single parents’ to receive what is due to them.

The introduction of charges stems partially from the government’s desire to provide value for money for the tax payer. However, the real driver behind charging is to change the environment in which the statutory scheme is seen as the default maintenance option. Sir David Henshaw, in his report that precipitated the 2008 Act, argued that charging would ‘contribute to the objectives of the new system by incentivising private arrangements, which can be more successful, helping child welfare through increased compliance… ‘

The campaign against charging has argued that upfront charging will reduce the numbers of parents who use the statutory scheme and, therefore, the numbers of parents with effective arrangements in place. However, the evidence collected by Henshaw suggested the opposite to be true. He concluded that:

‘Parents who are able to should be encouraged and supported to make their own arrangements. Such arrangements tend to result in higher satisfaction and compliance and allow individual circumstances to be reflected.’

His recommendation that the government should encourage parents to make their own private arrangements was, therefore, based firmly on the evidence that these produce better outcomes and greater compliance than the statutory system and that, as a result, more children would benefit from effective maintenance arrangements not fewer.

Much has also been made of the proposals to charge parents as a contribution to the ongoing cost to the state of collecting and enforcing payments. It has been argued that this, too, will reduce the number of effective maintenance arrangements and will significantly contribute to child poverty. However, it is worth getting this into proportion.

Based on current figures, at the lower end of the proposed percentage charges, 16% of Parents With Care would pay no more than 35p per week (less than the cost of three standard SMS text messages) and 40% would pay no more than 70p per week. And, if the Parent With Care did not prevent the money being paid through the Maintenance Direct system, where money is transferred without involving the state, even this modest amount wouldn’t be payable.

Of course it is necessary to ensure that any charging mechanism should not make the statutory scheme so expensive as to effectively remove it as a choice for those parents who may need it. There is a good case to be made for the burden of the charges to be borne by both parents and the government could consider introducing a sliding scale of upfront application charges for poorer parents who are not in receipt of qualifying benefits. Nevertheless, charging is an important mechanism for encouraging parents to move away from an automatic application through the statutory scheme and, instead, to consider making collaborative, family based arrangements.

Perhaps the most significant change that the proposals would introduce is, curiously, also the one that has received the least attention; the establishment of a new integrated model of relationship and family support services that will help parents to deal with the practical and emotional issues that can get in the way of successful maintenance arrangements and wider issues such as parenting time agreements.

At last, we have a government that has recognised that the issues that prevent parents from making effective child maintenance arrangements are not necessarily directly associated with making financial provision for their children. The proposals take account of the fact that child maintenance is just one of a range of issues that parents face when they go through divorce or separation.

Rather than dealing with maintenance in isolation, the new support service will help parents to deal with wider issues, whether they are emotional or communications problems, or practical concerns around things like parenting time, housing, debt or work. This early intervention approach that seeks to help parents build sustainable, collaborative post separation parenting relationships is key to helping children adjust to life after separation and gives families the tools and strategies that they need to manage the lifetime of transitions that separation brings.

Such support services have the very real potential to bring lasting change for the countless families who experience divorce or separation. This respectful, gender aware engagement could meet the different needs of mums and dads so that their personal experiences could be acknowledged and responded to in ways that promote the interests of children rather than upholding the individual rights of parents.

Perhaps this is why the proposals have drawn so much anger from the organisations that represent ‘single parents’. After all, they, and the organisations that represent ‘non resident’ fathers, are constituted around maximising the interests of the parents that they serve rather than the family as a whole.

So much of the campaign against the changes has relied on stereotypes and misrepresentations. It has sought to portray all so-called ‘non resident parents’ as being the cause of family breakdown, of being unwilling to take financial responsibility for their children after separation and of being coercive in their dealings with the ‘parent with care’.

However, it simply is not the case that ‘non resident parents’ are any more likely to be the cause of the separation than the ‘parent with care’ and it is not the case that the majority of ‘non resident parents’ attempt to evade their responsibilities after separation. Neither is it true that ‘non resident parents’ are any more likely to use coercive behaviour than ‘parents with care’.

The Department for Work and Pensions’ own statistics show that in only 17% of cases does a parent refuse to make maintenance payments and that in almost twice as many cases, 33%, the reason that there is no maintenance arrangement in place is because the ‘parent with care’ does not want anything to do with the ‘non resident parent’.

But what of the debate within parliament? After taking evidence, the House of Commons Work and Pensions Committee chose to recommend that paying parents should have money deducted from their salary or bank account, irrespective of how successfully their arrangements are working. An approach that is not only deeply flawed but is, in essence, punitive. Equally, the Committee’s recommendation, echoed in the Lords, to shift all of the burden of charging to the ‘non resident parent’ are based on the fallacy that it is only ‘non resident parents’ who are unwilling to make private arrangements for child maintenance.

Such approaches fail to learn the lessons from the failures of the Child Support Agency and would create more animosity between separating parents, lead to fewer successful arrangements, increase unnecessary bureaucracy and make the statutory system less effective for those who really need to use it.

It seems to me that child maintenance is, first and foremost, a private parenting decision and not the business of the state. Even before the changes, more than half the people currently in the statutory scheme say they would prefer to make a private arrangement if they were given the support to do so. Fewer cases in the statutory scheme will also mean a significantly better service for those who do need it.

Those organisations who campaign for the rights of ‘single parents’ will continue to use the stereotype of the abandoned mum and the deadbeat dad to try and derail these proposals but it is imperative that those who have the responsibility for making legislation look beyond the rhetoric. The lone parent model of support to separated families has failed countless children over the last forty years. The government must hold its nerve in the face of the opposition to these changes because, surely, it is time to do things differently and the current proposals have the potential to transform the lives of families for generations to come.

This article was originally published in Parliamentary Brief

UPDATE: The Government has now amended its original proposals on charging. The £100 and £50 charge has now been reduced to £20 in all circumstances.

How the ‘runaway dads’ message hinders the Coalition’s family policy aspirations

One of the most noticeable and defining features of the Coalition Government has been its focus on family and its recognition of the importance of fathers to children. David Cameron’s Father’s Day comments about ‘runaway dads’, therefore, come at a very interesting time as the Administration begins to look at how it will translate aspiration into legislation.

Not surprisingly, Mr Cameron’s comments provoked something of a backlash. What was notable, however, is that the negative responses they generated came more from the organisations representing ‘single mothers’ than from those articulating the experiences of separated dads, with the Prime Minister being accused of double standards and of failing single mums over child maintenance.

Of course, family separation has been a battleground for many decades with successive governments attempting to deal with the social and fiscal impact of increasing numbers of divorced and separated families and pressure groups fighting to influence policy and debate in ways that uphold the particular experiences of the groups that they represent; whether they be mothers or fathers.

The continued role of fathers in children’s lives has been a political hot potato since, at least, the Finer Report on One Parent Families, in 1974. Father’s rights campaigners have increasingly argued that men are effectively excluded from children’s lives after separation and women’s rights organisations and feminist academics have argued that any focus on the rights of fathers to remain present in their children’s lives undermines a mother’s right to live, and bring up children, autonomously.

But recent years have seen some significant changes. These days, even most single parent organisations, in public at least, grudgingly accept that children benefit from the ongoing involvement of both of their parents after divorce or separation – although this is often couched in terms of mothers acting as gatekeepers to that relationship. And this Government’s stated intention to encourage shared parenting and to ‘to look at how best to provide greater access [sic] rights to non-resident parents’ seemed to herald a fundamental shift in the way that family separation was to be debated and responded to.

All the more surprising, then, that Mr Cameron should fall back on such outdated and, quite frankly, fallacious representations of family separation and fathers’ experiences of and responses to it. But, then, perhaps not. The stereotypes that surround family separation are so powerful and so pervasive that maybe it is naive to imagine that such a profound change can happen over night.

If we examine David Cameron’s comments in isolation, it is very difficult to argue against the idea that dads shouldn’t abandon their families. But why single out dads? Why not also castigate mums? Quite simply, it is because of the widespread and erroneous belief that it is fathers who cause family separation and that, having done so, they abandon their wife and children to a life of poverty and destitution.

Take, for example, Baroness Deech, Chair of the Bar Standards Board, who, in an interview with Family Law last year stated that ‘the behaviour most likely to make society unhealthy, that damages these children more than anything else, is their father – it is usually the father – walking out and leaving them with no support.’ Or the Sunday Mirror who, in a recent leader column argued that ‘in a perfect world, couples could be persuaded to stay together and if fathers did leave their children they would pay for them.’

But why is it that so many people believe that it is fathers who cause family separation and abandon their families? It comes from two sources. Firstly, the very effective campaigning of single parent organisations like Gingerbread who gain advantage from perpetuating such caricatures. Secondly, and perhaps more significantly, it comes from the social policy structure that surrounds divorce and separation and the division of parents into ‘parent with care’ and ‘non resident parent’ with all the attendant connotations associated with those labels.

Interestingly, the terms ‘parent with care’ and ‘non resident parent’ have no legal meaning outside the narrow confines of the Child Support Act 1991 and its various amendments. But, so widely used are they that they have permeated the consciousness of not only the legislators and policy makers, but the myriad of services that parents encounter when they separate; from child maintenance workers to nursery staff, advice workers to mediators.

Ask someone how they feel about a ‘parent with care’ and they will likely respond that a ‘parent with care’ is a mum who has been abandoned and who is struggling to bring up her children alone; the PM’s ‘heroic’ single mum. Ask the same person how they feel about a ‘non resident (or absent) parent’ and they will likely tell you that this parent was the cause of the separation and is probably doing everything they can to evade their responsibilities.

From this, people draw the logical conclusion that, as most ‘non resident parents’ are men, it is men who are more likely to cause separation and it is fathers who are likely to try and evade their responsibilities. In reality, women are just as likely to end relationships as men and women are just as capable of unhelpful behaviours as men. The truth is that mums become the ‘parent with care’ because they assume that role and because the Child Benefit rules allow them to.

It is this division of parents, along with the adversarial nature of parenting support, that is the greatest barrier to dads being able to fulfil their ongoing responsibilities and the potential for parents to build collaborative post separation parenting relationships. Because of this division, all of the support, both financial and emotional, is delivered to mums. Dads feel that their experiences are unrecognised and unsupported and, worse, however hard they try to act responsibility, someone, somewhere is likely to be calling them names. Little wonder that many dads find it difficult to continue to parent after separation.

What is interesting is that the Prime Minister’s words seem to be at such odds with some of the work that the Coalition is doing around family policy such as the hugely progressive reforms that are being made on child maintenance. The Green Paper, Strengthening families, promoting parental responsibility: the future of child maintenance is an absolute breath of fresh air. At the heart of the proposals is a philosophy that families, themselves, are best placed to determine what arrangements will work best in their circumstances and an intention to encourage the involvement of both parents in their children’s lives after divorce or separation.

Building on the Child Maintenance and Other Payments Act 2008, it contains non of the negative stereotypes of previous legislative drives and recognises that both parents need access to the kinds of support that will enable them to build family based arrangements that put the needs of their children first. It also recognises the ongoing inter-dependency in families and attempts to respond to some of the complexities of family separation.

And the Government could go further in achieving its aspiration to encourage and support the role of fathers after separation. It could ditch the ‘lone parent’ model that supports one parent to the exclusion of the other and conceives separation as a purely poverty issue. It could reflect the responsibilities of both parents in the tax and benefits system and take the income of both parents into account in the statutory maintenance scheme. And it could remove the divisive concepts of care and contact from family law

Most of all, it needs to promote and invest in services that encourage collaboration rather than division. And it need look no further than the Child Maintenance Options service to see how engaging with both parents without labels or judgements maximises the potential for parental cooperation. The numbers of ‘non resident’ fathers who approach this service without coercion suggest that this is a much more effective way of ensuring that parents continue to fulfil their responsibilities than hectoring and lecturing.

But, just as importantly, it is imperative that we move beyond myths and stereotypes; myths and stereotypes that are so powerful that we believe men are always the cause of family breakdown even though 68 per cent of divorces are granted to the wife¹, so powerful that we believe fathers always evade their financial responsibilities even though in the cases where there is no child maintenance arrangement, the most common explanation is that the ‘parent with care’ does not want any contact with the non-resident parent (33%)². If we are really going to support children living in separated families, we need to dispel the myth that every separated family equals an abandoned wife and a philandering, feckless husband, even though that is sometimes the case.

The Government must not lose its nerve in the face of hostility from single parent organisations and the Opposition if it is to seriously tackle the issues of divorce and separation. Its child maintenance reform proposals have demonstrated that it is prepared to take a radical and rational policy approach to family separation and its cross departmental work between the DfE, DWP and MoJ can only be good for families.

The Coalition has also signalled that it is prepared to think differently about fatherhood and to recognise and respect the vital contribution that fathers make to children’s development. It has the opportunity to make changes that will support families for many decades to come. A more nuanced appreciation of the barriers that parents face when they separate, together with respectful and empathic service delivery, is what will help families to deal with the challenges that come with separation and meet their ongoing responsibilities to their children.

¹ Office for National Statistics; General Register Office for Scotland; Northern Ireland Statistics and Research Agency, 2007.

² National Centre for Social Research on behalf of the DWP, 2008.

Why I support the proposed child maintenance reforms

The Government is currently consulting on proposed changes to the child maintenance system. The Green Paper, Strengthening families, promoting parental responsibility: the future of child maintenance, builds on changes that came about under the previous Government who introduced the Child Maintenance and Other Payments Act 2008.

At the heart of the proposed reforms is a philosophy that families, themselves, are best placed to determine what arrangements will work best in their circumstances and an intention to encourage the involvement of both parents in their children’s lives after divorce or separation. As well as promoting child-focussed, family based private agreements, the reforms would provide parents with an integrated model of relationship and family support services that would help them to deal with the practical and emotional issues that can get in the way of successful maintenance arrangements.

Perhaps not surprisingly, the proposed reforms have created a storm of protest from, amongst others, single parent organisations, poverty campaigners, the TUC and the Church of England. But I firmly believe that it is right to support families to work together to reach agreements that are in the best interests of their children and to see child maintenance as one of a range of joint responsibilities that parents have after divorce or separation.

Much of the attention that has surrounded the publication of the Green Paper has concerned the introduction of charges for use of the statutory scheme. This attention has largely been driven by organisations that advocate on behalf of lone parents who, in keeping with past campaigns around child maintenance, have portrayed the introduction of charges as a child poverty issue.

Whilst the proposed changes to child maintenance that require primary legislation are contained with the Welfare Reform Bill, it is important to recognise that child maintenance is not a welfare benefit, nor is it a child poverty issue. Child maintenance is essentially a parenting decision. It is about how both parents will continue to discharge their responsibility for their children after they divorce or separate.

It is argued that upfront charging will reduce the numbers of parents who use the statutory scheme and, therefore, the numbers of parents with effective arrangements in place. I would point to the evidence provided by Sir David Henshaw, in his 2006 report Recovering child support: routes to responsibility, that:

‘Parents who are able to should be encouraged and supported to make their own arrangements. Such arrangements tend to result in higher satisfaction and compliance and allow individual circumstances to be reflected.’

His recommendation that the government should encourage parents to make their own private arrangements was, therefore, based firmly on the evidence that these produce better outcomes and greater compliance than the statutory system and that, as a result, more children would benefit from effective maintenance arrangements not fewer.

Sir David also identified that charging would:

‘contribute to the objectives of the new system by incentivising private arrangements, which can be more successful, helping child welfare through increased compliance…’

Charging to use the statutory child maintenance system, therefore, provides an incentive for parents who are divorcing or separating to consider the alternatives to the statutory scheme.

Of course it is necessary to ensure that those charges should not make the statutory scheme so expensive as to effectively remove it as a choice for those parents who may need it but are financially disadvantaged and, for that reason, the Centre for Separated Families is proposing that the government should consider introducing a sliding scale of upfront application charges for poorer parents who are not in receipt of qualifying benefits.

Much has been made of the proposals to charge parents as a contribution to the ongoing costs to the state of collecting and enforcing payments. It has been argued that this, too, will reduce the number of effective maintenance arrangements and will significantly contribute to child poverty. But, at the lower end of the proposed percentage charges, 16% of Parents With Care would pay no more than 35p per week (that’s less than the cost of three standard SMS text messages) and 40% of parents with care would pay no more than 70p per week. If the Parent With Care didn’t prevent the money being paid through the Maintenance Direct system, even this modest amount wouldn’t be payable.

The Government’s approach of viewing child maintenance, not in isolation, but one of a range of issues that families must deal with as they go through the difficult process of divorce or separation is not only sensible but forward thinking and builds on Henshaw’s findings of 2006. Its drive to promote private child focussed, family based maintenance agreements should, I feel, be welcomed by anyone who’s primary concern is the welfare of children rather than the rights of parents.

Welfare Reform Bill Public Bill Committees, 24 March 2011 (oral evidence)

Stephen Timms (East Ham, Labour): I would like to ask about provision for support for child care costs. We do not yet know how the Government propose child care costs will be supported in future. What do you think the arrangements should be? Should there be support for people who work less than 16 hours a week, as well as those who work more than that? How should child care payments be made and to whom? What proportion of costs should be covered?

Nick Woodall: When families separate, there can be quite a disruption to the organisation of the family. Certainly for people who may not have been in the labour market to get back into work, or for people who may need to change their working patterns, child care costs can be extremely important. We urge the Committee to think about the potential for child care costs to reflect the responsibilities that each parent has after family separation, and the potential for supporting both parents in their child care obligations.

Stephen Timms (East Ham, Labour): I want to ask about clause 97. It amends the Social Security Administration Act 1992 to give the Secretary of State the power to decide which partner should receive a payment—or any part of that payment—in cases where benefit is awarded to a couple jointly. Are you confident that that provision addresses the concerns raised by you and a number of others about purse-to-wallet redistribution of income?

Nick Woodall: We have concerns when we look at things such as child tax credit that can currently only be paid into one household, because that does not always reflect the levels of caring. We are talking about the parent who has the greatest responsibility for caring for the child—the main carer.

In some circumstances, parents choose to work together equitably for the care of their children, but the financial aspects of that are not reflected in the way the system works. Parents can go to court and get a joint residence order. They can work on a 50:50 basis, but come out of court and find that all the tax relief and benefits are paid to one parent to the exclusion of the other. That can upset what would otherwise be equitable and workable collaborative parenting arrangements.

Sheila Gilmore (Edinburgh East, Labour): One of the provisions of the Bill is to introduce new arrangements, or new hurdles, for getting statutory child maintenance. One is about putting in an extra stage of trying to get people to go through mediation. There is also the question of financial hurdles if introducing charges for the applicant parent—the parent with care—as well as perhaps the other parent. It has been suggested that charges should be added to the collection process. What are your feelings about that? I appreciate that some of it is still out to consultation.

Nick Woodall: While the proposed changes to child maintenance that require primary legislation are contained with the Welfare Reform Bill, it is important that we recognise that child maintenance is not a benefit. Child maintenance is not, as it is often popularised, a poverty issue either. Child maintenance is essentially a parenting issue. It is about how both parents are going to continue to discharge their responsibility to their children after they separate. We certainly welcome the idea that this is cross-departmental, that the Government are beginning to see child maintenance in its wider context.

Parents themselves are best placed to make their own arrangements for their family. They can reflect in any maintenance arrangements the nuances and complexities in their family system. We believe that the state’s role is to encourage and empower parents to be able to make their own private arrangements. The state should get involved only where parents cannot or will not make such arrangements.

In his 2006 report, Sir David Henshaw recognised that arrangements that parents made for themselves lasted longer, and there was greater compliance and flexibility further down the line. His overall vision for the changes to child maintenance was about encouraging people to move away from using the statutory system, which was inflexible and caused greater division between parents, and encouraging them to make their own arrangements.

Henshaw saw that you needed to change the environment that caused the statutory system to be seen as the default option for parents. When parents were separated and there were high levels of distress and anxiety, they often initially looked around for what they could turn to. The child maintenance system, the statutory system—the Child Support Agency—was seen as that default option, and in many ways, it still is. He argued that something should put the brakes on parents, so that they reviewed the situation and were given the support, encouragement and information they needed to be able to make their own arrangements.

We think that the measure is a step further from what the previous Government did under the 2008 Act. It asks, “How do we do this? What can we put in place that will support parents around the wider issues?” The issues that prevent successful child maintenance arrangements are not always related to child maintenance; they are related much more to emotional problems, to housing and to a range of other factors. What can we do to support parents? We believe that the proposals will begin to help.

The charging is a bit of a red herring. In the figures that show the people who are affected, 16% of those who are using the statutory system would pay no more than 35p a week, 40% would pay no more than 70p a week—that is at the lower end of the Government’s proposals. We need to look at the measure in its widest context.

Sheila Gilmore (Edinburgh East, Labour): From my experience as a family lawyer, in the vast majority of cases people made their own arrangements. I do not recognise the scenario that you are painting. Parents made such arrangements with assistance through a legal agreement, which would be binding. Certainly, in Scotland, such an agreement would be equally as enforceable as a court order, which you could no longer get. Clearly, however, in some situations there is a power imbalance or there has been a difficult relationship. Is that not very difficult for people?

Nick Woodall: I absolutely agree. The section 6 repeal was a huge step forward, because it stopped forcing those people who were capable of making their own private arrangements into the statutory system. But yes, absolutely, some relationships make it extremely difficult —or impossible—for parents to make private arrangements. But they are the minority.

I guess we would say that it is about time that we stopped making legislation based on minority experiences and looked at the wider cohort of separated families. What is going on out there in the world? We find that the majority of parents want to do the best things for their children and they want to make private arrangements for them, but they struggle to know how to do so. The proposal is that there will be a gateway that puts the brakes on people using the statutory system, but something will come underneath that to say, “Here’s a range of services, some information and some things that will help you make those private arrangements.” When we look at what is out there already, there are some very good things, but our concern is that there are also some things that are not so good. We need to be careful that we do not signpost people [to services that either fail to understand the complex needs of separated families or work from parental rights based positions.]

Norway’s paternal quota

A few months ago, I wrote about how Margaret Hodge had argued that increasing paternity leave was pointless because fathers just didn’t bother taking it. I’m currently preparing a paper on different approaches to supporting fathers’ involvement in their children’s early lives in Norway and Germany. The Norwegian experience shows just how successful the right kind of public policies can be.

Parents in Norway have the right to a paid leave of absence during the first year of a child’s life. Parents may choose to take a total of 46 weeks of leave at 100 per cent pay or 56 weeks at 80 per cent pay.

To encourage more men to assume a greater share of care-giving responsibilities, 10 weeks of parental leave are reserved for fathers. This is known as the paternal quota. If a father does not use his quota, these weeks will be forfeited. Norway was the first country in the world to establish such a scheme.

Since 1977 fathers have had the right to share parental leave with mothers. Nevertheless, at the beginning of the 1990s only 2-3 per cent of all fathers were taking advantage of this opportunity. The paternal quota was introduced in 1993 to encourage more fathers to participate in caring for their child during its first year of life.

In 2008, 90 per cent of fathers used their paternal quota and a growing number of men are choosing to take more leave than their quota. In 2008, 16.5 per cent of fathers extended their leave beyond the reserved 10 weeks, compared to 11 per cent in 2000.

The figures are fantastic and, set against the British experience, astonishing. It turns paternity leave from being a kind of holiday into a period of time when fathers and children can build strong and lasting bonds.

A recent study by Lancaster University management school shows that there are significant and ongoing changes in attitudes towards parenting, here in the UK. Let’s hope that we learn the lessons from Norway.

Extending the support and information available to parents

In 2006, David Henshaw was asked to lead a redesign of the child support system. His report formed the basis of the Child Maintenance and Other Payments Act 2008 and the Child Maintenance Act (Northern Ireland) 2008.

In his report, he made a number of significant recommendations. Firstly, he noted that:

Parents who are able to should be encouraged and supported to make their own arrangements. Such arrangements tend to result in higher satisfaction and compliance and allow individual circumstances to be reflected.

Secondly, he argued that:

The state should only get involved when parents cannot come to agreement themselves…

He also recognised that:

Increasing the choices for parents depends on clear, high-quality advice and support being made available to all.

I spent the last three weeks of October in Belfast working with the Child Maintenance Information and Support Service, part of the Department for Social Development, training staff to ensure that the high-quality advice and support that they provide is accessible, empathic and empowering.

I was hugely impressed by the skills, knowledge and commitment of the ISS team and their determination to offer parents a service that recognises the complexities of family separation. Their respectful engagement with separated mums and dads can help families to share the financial responsibilities of bringing up children without squashing them into the straight jacket roles of ‘parent with care’ and ‘non resident parent’.

And its this kind of respectful engagement that we need more of. Where separation is unavoidable, parents need more high-quality support and information to help them manage the end of their marriage or relationship. And not just around child maintenance, but around all of the other issues that are critical in ensuring that children can adapt.

As David Henshaw wrote in 2006:

There should be more accessible and joined-up advice services to help people in making these choices. These should be part of the wider range of services for separating parents.

Maybe now is the time to look at extending the support and information available to parents so that they can make the right kinds of choices for both themselves and, most importantly, their children.

Time for a shift in thinking

As the Family Justice Review closes for evidence, I was struck by two conflicting articles. The first was in direct relation to the Review and appeared in The Guardian. It said that “there is growing evidence that family law has spectacularly failed to keep up with the changing role of men within the home and that children are suffering as a result. Judges are accused of stereotyping, making a legal presumption in favour of the mother and awarding meagre access [sic] rights to dads.”

It highlighted one father’s experience of separation:

When Paul returned home from a six-month tour of duty in Afghanistan, he found his key no longer fitted his front door. “My wife had changed the locks on the house I was paying the mortgage on, and my kids were inside with her new bloke,” he said. “I can’t tell you what I felt, trying to make sense of it all. It was a bad dream. She had a lawyer lined up to talk about money and they seemed stunned when I said I wanted contact.”

The next day, Family Law ran an interview with Baroness Deech, Chair of the Bar Standards Board, about a lecture she had given on co-habitation. Apart from a slightly bizarre suggestion that women only co-habit in the hope that men will marry them, she stated:

“[T]he behaviour most likely to make society unhealthy, that damages these children more than anything else, is their father – it is usually the father – walking out and leaving them with no support. Nobody says a word about that.”

The Children Act (1989) is a completely gender neutral piece of legislation. It favours neither mothers nor fathers but states simply that the child’s welfare shall be the court’s paramount consideration. Similarly, the various child maintenance acts don’t say that fathers will pay mothers, simply that the so-called non resident parent will pay the so-called parent with care.

The problem that many fathers face is that the attitudes of those who form policy and pass judgement have, as The Guardian article suggests, failed to move with the times. Contrary to what Baroness Deech believes, women are just as likely to end relationships as men are. We need to dispel the myth that every separated family equals an abandoned wife and a philandering, feckless husband.

As Adrienne Burgess points out, “in the past 30 years, men’s involvement with their children has gone up 800-fold”. It’s probably about time that this shift in social behaviour was recognised.

Increasing the take up of paternity leave

I remember, a few years back, the then Children’s Minister, Margaret Hodge, arguing that it was pointless increasing paternity leave because fathers just didn’t bother taking it. Clearly, it hadn’t occurred to her that it in a world that judges men by their commitment to work, it might be difficult for men to put family before job.

This is clearly an issue for dads in other countries too. So now the Swedish trade union, Unionen, has come up with its own innovative idea for encouraging companies to make it easier for men to take parental leave; the Guldnappen or Golden Dummy.

This initiative judges companies on having an equalities basis to their family policies. It looks, for instance, at how flexible workplaces are, whether employers take into account children’s daycare hours and special circumstances such as children falling sick.

“We are looking for employers who encourage both men and women to take parental leave”, says Shadé Jalali, Equality Specialist at the union. Too many employers, she notes, still apply traditional thinking: “they don’t even ask men if they want to take parental leave – so what we are saying is, at least ask!

Parents in Sweden are entitled to a combined total of 480 days of parental leave but it’s mostly women who take advantage of it. Let’s hope this initiative helps both mums and dads to enjoy and contribute to their children’s early lives and offers future Children’s Ministers in this country a few pointers too.

More statistics, same old fog

Single parent organisation Gingerbread’s latest broadside against the Child Maintenance Commission and (so-called) non resident parents has seen press releases in every constituency in the UK highlighting, what it claims to be, the amount of maintenance owed to parents. It claims that, nationally, £3,761 million was owed in child maintenance arrears as of March 2010.

But, the figures put forward by Gingerbread are both irresponsible and misleading. Around half of the total figure cited is owed to the `Secretary of State´ (i.e. the government) and represents income related benefits paid to, what the CSA classes as, ‘parents with care’ before child maintenance was disconnected from the benefits system; it is not ‘owed’ to parents. It also includes a substantial element of estimated arrears.

However, Adrian Sanders, Liberal Democrat MP for Torbay has, like many others, fallen for it hook line and sinker and claims that he and his party are “proposing the scrapping of CMEC, transferring responsibility to Revenue and Customs so that absent (sic) parents tax records can be matched to their cases. For those who do not pay regular maintenance, arrears can then be automatically deducted via the tax system.”

He doesn’t appear to understand that the Child Maintenance Commission does not exist simply to operate the statutory maintenance system – which it currently does through the CSA – but also to help parents make their own private arrangements, something that the Henshaw Report, which preceded the Child Maintenance and Other Payments Act 2008, demonstrated tended “to result in higher satisfaction and compliance and allow individual circumstances to be reflected.”

Contrary to the campaigning of single parent organisations, family separation and child maintenance are complex areas. A failure to understand this and an over-reliance on myths and stereotypes has, in the past, led to poor legislation. It is to be hoped that the Coalition will take the time and effort to understand the issues more clearly.