On 3 August the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) published statistics for ‘effective family-based child maintenance arrangements’, for the year from April 2015 to March 2016.
A few words of explanation, for the benefit of those who are not au fait with the current child support/maintenance scheme. The primary rationale behind the scheme is to encourage (entice?) parents to agree their own child maintenance arrangements, rather than put the public purse to the expense of having to do it for them. This has the added benefit that it reduces the burden on the Child Maintenance Service (CMS, formerly the Child Support Agency), thereby making them look more efficient and, in turn, making the government look better.
The ‘encouragement’ is done in two ways: providing the parents with information and support via Child Maintenance Options, the ‘gateway’ to the CMS, and in particular by letting them know that if they can’t agree things themselves and therefore require the CMS to sort it out for them, they will have to pay a fee for the privilege. A maintenance arrangement that is not reached through the CMS (or the courts) is known as a ‘Family-based Arrangement’ (FBA).
As mentioned, the statistics released by the DWP refer to what they call ‘Effective Family-based Arrangements’. What is an effective FBA? They are defined as either of the following:
- A regular financial agreement where at least some of the agreed maintenance amount is always/usually received on time and the parent (presumably the parent with care of the child, who is in receipt of the maintenance) considers the arrangement to be working very or fairly well; or
- An ad-hoc arrangement which includes a financial element (or transaction in kind e.g. provision of a school uniform) and the parent considers the arrangement to be working very or fairly well.
So, what are the figures? Well, the DWP tell us that over one in four CM Options customers set up an FBA during the year, of which over three-quarters are effective. To be precise, 77 per cent of customers with an FBA in the last year had one that was effective, up from 74 per cent in the previous year. Meanwhile, 49 per cent of arrangements were set up with the CMS, leaving 23 per cent of customers with no arrangement.
Now, the statistics are only about FBAs, so they say nothing about how much maintenance is collected under arrangements set up by the CMS. Accordingly, I’m only going to discuss the effectiveness of FBAs here. Still, FBAs are really the ‘flagship’ element of the new system, so it’s an important discussion.
The statistics go on to tell us that during the year CM Options customers arranged a total of 76,800 FBAs. Of these, 35,900 were classed as ‘effective’, 17,600 were non-effective and 23,300 were classed as “Other effective FBAs”. “Other effective FBAs” are defined as FBAs not secured as a result of contact with CM Options (which, to my mind, means that they are not CM Options customers, but we’ll overlook that point).
Looking a little deeper, what is the methodology behind the statistics? Well, the DWP provide a handy methodology document, which tells us that the statistics are based on surveying CM Options customers. However, we are warned that the results of the survey have limitations. In particular, a large proportion of customers refused to take part in the survey, and therefore non-response bias in the results “is a concern”.
OK, what does all of this leave us with?
Well, going through the above in reverse order, we firstly have a ‘large number’ of customers who refuse to take part in the survey. Now, we can’t draw any definite conclusions from this, but it is probably a fair guess that many of them refuse to take part because they are not satisfied with the outcome. In other words, they most likely fall into either the ‘no arrangement’ category or the ‘non-effective FBA’ category. Not a good start.
Moving on, we have those 17,600 non-effective FBAs. As indicated above, that is nearly a quarter of all FBAs arranged during the year. That is a large proportion, and a large number of children that are suffering from financial hardship as a result.
And then there are the 23 per cent of customers with no arrangement at all. What is happening in those cases? In how many of them is no maintenance being paid at all? A large proportion, one would imagine. This is surely a clear and substantial failure of the system.
And finally we come to that definition of ‘effective’. Now, call me old-fashioned but my idea of an effective child maintenance arrangement is one in which all of the maintenance is paid on time, not one where ‘at least some’ is paid. And as for the ‘ad-hoc’ arrangements, I know these can work, but I remember from my experience when I was practising that they were often imposed upon the parent with care (PWC) by the non-resident parent (NRP), because the NRP believed that if he paid money to the PWC she would spend it on herself, rather than on the child. Accordingly, the NRP insisted upon buying items himself for the child, rather than paying money to the PWC.
So, as far as FBAs go, we have a system whereby some parents pay something, a lot of parents pay too little and an even larger number probably pay nothing at all. Doesn’t sound that effective to me.
The DWP statistics can be found here.
Photo by D Coetzee via Flickr under the Public Domain.