25 January 2012 was the day of a crucial vote in the House of Lords on charging single mothers to apply to the statutory maintenance scheme to replace the Child Support Agency. About three days before the vote, Maria Miller asked the Child Maintenance and Enforcement Commissioner, Noel Shanahan, to produce an alarmingly high figure for the cost of a “typical” CSA case. Noel Shanahan duly obliged. He took one extremely unusual case, and extrapolated this to the whole of the CSA cohort. In the three days preceding the vote, the false claim that a “typical” CSA case cost the tax payer £25,000 to £40,000 was repeated several times in Parliament and the media. It took time for Gingerbread to deconstruct the lie and complain to the head of the UK Statistics Authority, who admonished the Work and Pensions Secretary, Iain Duncan Smith. However, the lie lives on in perpetuity on the gov.uk website.
According to Gingerbread, around 22 January 2012 - three days before the House of Lords vote - Conservative peer, Lord Freud, wrote to all Peers, claiming that:
“A typical case costs the taxpayer around £25,000 to administer.”
On 22 January 2012 the Express reported that: “The costs of chasing absent parents for maintenance can top £40,000 if enforcement action is needed. Even if both sides agree, the average cost of handling a case can still reach £25,000.”
Also on 22 January 2012 The Sunday Times reported that: “Controversial plans to charge parents for using the Child Support Agency (CSA) will be defended by the government this week with the disclosure that a typical case costs the taxpayer £25,000.”
On 25 January 2012 the Department for Work and Pensions, Iain Duncan Smith and Maria Miller issued a press release, "Putting children first - £20 million to help separating families", featuring Karen Woodall of the Centre for Separated Families, stating that: “A typical case in the CSA can cost the taxpayer around £25,000 rising to around £40,000 if enforcement action is needed.” No caveat or retraction was published to amend this press release, which remains on the www.gov.uk website.
On 25 January 2012 The Times reported Maria Miller claiming: “Every case that entered the statutory system cost the taxpayer between £26,000 and £40,000, she said, adding that charges would encourage couples to come to their own arrangements.”
“Furthermore, taxpayers are supporting costs of up to £25,000 for some typical CSA cases and up to £40,000 where we need to take substantial enforcement action”
“To reiterate, I mentioned that the cost of a typical CSA case is up to £25,000 and that can rise up to £40,000 where we need to take substantial enforcement action.”
Lord Mackay of Clashfern, a Conservative Peer, who was Lord Chancellor in Margaret Thatcher’s Government when the CSA was first set up, led a successful revolt and defeated the proposal to charge single mothers to use the statutory service.
Lord Mackay is a strict and committed Presbyterian Christian, but of the old school.
On 26 January 2012, the day after the House of Lords revolted, the Guardian reported that: “The department for work and pensions said in a statement: “It is right and fair there is a charge for using a service that can cost the taxpayer £25,000 per case and almost half a billion pounds a year.”
On 29 January 2012 Iain Duncan Smith was interviewed by Andrew Marr on BBC Radio 4, and said:
“It costs at the moment between £25,000 and £40,000 for a case to be settled… we’re still going to pick up the lion's share of the cost - but we also have fairness to the taxpayer who's paying huge sums of money to run this badly.”
On 1 February 2012 the subject of charging single parents was debated in the House of Commons as part of the Welfare Reform Bill.
Conservative MP Sarah Newton, clearly primed by Maria Miller, asked: “My understanding is that each CSA case costs the taxpayer about £25,000 in administration charges, and that can even go up to £40,000 if enforcement action is taken, so what estimate has she made of the savings to the taxpayer that will result from the new proposals?” Maria Miller replied, “My hon. Friend cites those figures accurately, and the savings throughout this spending review period and into the next will be considerable indeed—running, I believe, into about £200 million.”
Later in the debate, Maria Miller lied again to the House: “Each case costs around £26,000, or up to £40,000 if it involves any sort of enforcement.”
Labour MP Anne McGuire asked: “If the Minister gets the opportunity to wind up, will she tell the House where the Government got the figure of £25,000 from? That, apparently, is the cost to the taxpayer of each case. I cannot find the source for that figure. If we divide 1,142,600 cases into £450 million, which is how much it costs to run the CSA, we get an annual cost of £393.90. So where on earth does the £25,000 figure come from? I would be interested to know.”
Naturally, Maria Miller ignored the question, knowing that Noel Shanahan had plucked it from the air for her propaganda purposes.
On 5 March 2012 the Public Accounts Committee took oral evidence from Sir Robert Devereux, the Permanent Secretary to the Department for Work and Pensions, and Noel Shanahan, Chief Executive of the Child Maintenance and Enforcement Commission. The scepticism of Labour MPs, Dame Margaret Hodge and Fiona Mactaggart, descended into exasperation as they tried to wrangle an explanation from the officials of how such implausible figures had been produced. Like a naughty schoolboy caught lying, Noel Shanahan was forced to admit that he had concocted the figures for his Minister, Maria Miller. Phil Gibby, of the National Audit Office, observed that “they are extreme, hypothetical examples of what can happen”, and the accusation left hanging in the air was that the figures had been deliberately and massively exaggerated in order to persuade MPs and Peers to vote for the controversial child maintenance reforms. The figures of £25,000 and £40,000 had been produced by selecting two unusually expensive cases and multiplying the cost by eighteen years, even though the Government’s own consultation document presented to Parliament in January 2011, “Strengthening families, promoting parental responsibility: the future of child maintenance” stated on page 21 that “an average case can be expected to last nine years”.
On 13 March 2012 Janet Allbeson, Senior Policy Adviser at Gingerbread, submitted written evidence to the Public Accounts Committee, demonstrating that the real lifetime cost of a “typical” CSA case was under £4,000 - less than a sixth of the lower figure of the two claimed by ministers.
On 19 March 2012 Sir Robert Devereux supplied a written explanation to the Public Accounts Committee of how the figures had been calculated, adding that “we are making the CMEC website clear”.
On 16 April 2012 Fiona Weir, Chief Executive of Gingerbread, sent a letter to Sir Andrew Dilnot, the Chair of the UK Statistics Authority: “I am writing to you to draw your attention to figures cited recently by DWP Ministers in key Parliamentary debates concerning the introduction of fees to use the statutory child maintenance service. We believe that the figures given to Parliament were considerably misleading and capable of causing MPs and Peers to draw wrong conclusions.”
Fiona Weir went on to give examples of Government Ministers claiming that the cost of administering a typical Child Support Agency case was £25,000, rising to £40,000 where there was enforcement action. And she illustrated how the figures, rather than being typical, were “based on just two cases from the 1.14 million cases that the CSA deals with each year, one of which was costed at £25,000 and the other “difficult case” at around £40,000.”
On 14 May 2012 Sir Andrew Dilnot replied to Fiona Weir that he was “pleased to have received assurance from DWP statisticians that, following the transfer of functions from CMEC to DWP, the same basis used to produce the £25,000 and £40,000 estimates will not be used in the future, and that DWP statisticians will ensure that the methodological basis for recording cost measures will be explained clearly on the statistics pages of the DWP website. The Statistics Authority will continue to monitor this closely.”
On 18 May 2012 the Public Accounts Committee stated in its formal report: “ The Commission's website noted that its costs of a "typical case" were £25,000, rising to £40,000 for more difficult cases. In response to our questions the Commission admitted that these figures were actually an example of what a case could cost. In fact the average annual cost of a case is £622 and the average length of a case is nine years. The Department told us that it "would make the CMEC website clear.”
However, on 11 July 2012 Conservative MP Sheryll Murray, who was clearly very committed and passionate about improving the Child Support Agency, told MPs that “a typical case costs the taxpayer £25,000”.
Evidently the lie had taken root in the minds of Conservative MPs, even those who were not innately hostile to single mothers.
I do not know the extent of the UK Statistics Authority’s remit. But it seems, to me, an inadequate response to merely ask the DWP to amend statistics published on its own website, which, realistically, very few people would look at, and after the harm had been done - after the claims had played their part in the orchestrated campaign to persuade MPs, Peers and the public that single parent families and the statutory child maintenance system were an intolerable burden on the taxpayer. There was no rebuke for the fact that grossly exaggerated claims about the cost of a “typical” CSA case had been made to two million viewers of the Andrew Marr Show on BBC1, two million readers of the Guardian and the Daily Express, to MPs in the House of Commons and Peers in the House of Lords during voting debates, and in various other arenas.
Noel Shanahan was the Chief Executive of the DVLA for four years, then Chief Executive of the Child Maintenance and Enforcement Commission for two years, and finally Director General of the Department for Work and Pensions for four years before retiring from the Civil Service last year. Maria Miller read Economics at the London School of Economics. Lord Freud read Politics, Philosophy and Economics at Merton College, Oxford, before working on the Financial Times, and as a stockbroker and investment banker before devising Universal Credit. Lord De Mauley went to Eton.
So these are not people who can’t do maths. It beggars belief that between the four of them, not one was able to spot that the figures were exaggerated by between four and ten times. This was not an innocent mistake. It was calculated and deliberate misrepresentation by experienced, wily operators who knew that, even if it was challenged, it would be challenged too mildly and too late to undo the damage.
The wilfully misleading claims remain unchallenged on the public record. I have been unable to find any published retraction, apology or explanation for the misleading claims. Although Ministers do not appear to have repeated the claims following Sir Andrew Dilnot’s mild rebuke, mission was already accomplished - the figures were out there, firmly in the minds of MPs, Peers and the public. Lord Mackay defeated the Government on 25 January 2012, but although he won the battle, he didn’t win the war. Merely requiring the DWP website to alter its content was largely irrelevant. Normal people, even MPs, get their news from television, radio and the press not from the DWP website. Nobody but members of the Public Accounts Committee and the UK Statistics Authority would have had any idea that the Government had been exaggerating the costs of a typical CSA case by up to ten times.
BBC One’s Sunday morning Andrew Marr Show viewing figures average 2 million. The Guardian and the Daily Express each had a daily readership of over 1 million in 2012. Between them, The Times and the Sunday Times had a readership per issue of nearly 4 million.
So, between the newspapers and television, and the Andrew Marr Show on BBC1, around eight million people were told, between 22 and 29 January 2012, that a typical CSA case cost the tax payer £25,000, with a typical case that required enforcement costing the tax payer up to £40,000. It is highly likely that the figures were repeated elsewhere, on local and national radio in particular.
Postscript: On 9 January 2014, Liberal Democrat Minister, Steve Webb, who took over responsibility for child maintenance from Maria Miller on 4 September 2012, said:
“The statutory cost of each child benefitting has fallen from £488 in 2010-11 to £425 in 2011-12.”
As the average length of a CSA case was nine years, the true cost of a “typical CSA case” was £3,825. Ministers had deliberately exaggerated the cost by six and a half times as part of their propaganda against single mothers.