Since 2011, Conservative ministers have been consistently dismissive about the relationship between child poverty and non payment of child maintenance. They have made repeated claims that child maintenance has little or no positive effect on alleviating child poverty. And they have consistently omitted the subject of child maintenance from official reports on child poverty (which, as I show, they blame on single mothers).
In March 2007 the DWP published a Summary of Research Report 405 by Christine Skinner, Jonathan Bradshaw and Jacqueline Davidson of York University, titled Child Support Policy: An international perspective.
Of fourteen countries examined, in the United Kingdom:
“A smaller proportion of non-widowed lone parents received child maintenance than in any other country. However for those receiving child maintenance the level of payment was comparatively high. Child maintenance made a comparatively small contribution to the relief of child poverty overall but if lone parents actually received child maintenance the poverty reduction achieved was much more significant, producing child poverty rates which were less than half what they would have been without child maintenance (at least in 2000). The impact of child maintenance also varied according to whether the lone parent was or was not in employment. For lone parents in employment in the UK child maintenance in 2000 could reduce child poverty by over two thirds – more than any other country except Austria, France and the Netherlands. However it was not more effective overall because comparatively few non-widowed lone parents had employment and child maintenance.”
In February 2010, towards the end of the Labour Government, the Work and Pensions Committee published its report into The Child Maintenance and Enforcement Commission and the Child Support Agency’s Operational Improvement Plan.
68. The 2006 White Paper stated that one of the principles underpinning the child maintenance system redesign was the need to tackle child poverty.
72. Improving the operation of the child maintenance system is integral to the Government’s strategy for reducing levels of child poverty. We are unhappy that the Commission’s contribution to these cross-Government targets cannot be precisely quantified. We call on the Department to establish meaningful performance indicators for the Commission to measure its contribution to efforts to combat child poverty.
In January 2011 Iain Duncan Smith wrote a letter to Dame Anne Begg, then Chair of the Work and Pensions Committee, concluding that:
“Child maintenance does not, on its own, make a statistically significant contribution to lifting children out of poverty.”
The lie that non payment of child maintenance is an important contributor to child poverty appears to have originated with Nick Woodall, fraudster, fathers’ rights extremist, and favourite of Maria Miller and Iain Duncan Smith, who told the Public Bill Committee on 24 March 2011:
“Child maintenance isn’t, as it’s often popularised, a poverty issue. Child maintenance is essentially a parenting issue.”
The Work and Pensions Committee report on the Government’s proposed child maintenance reforms, published on 3 July 2011, said:
“The lack of a child maintenance agreement or failure to make due payments have severe financial consequences for families producing a devastating impact on children’s wellbeing.” (Page 3)
“Our primary concern is that all parents should accept responsibility for their children's welfare, including financial responsibility. Parents with care should receive the agreed level of child maintenance in full, on a predictable and regular basis, because unpaid maintenance or late payments can have a devastating impact on parents with care and the wellbeing of their children.” (Page 8)
On 25 January 2012 Lord Freud told the House of Lords:
“Our view is that the [Social Mobility and Child Poverty] Commission should not be involved in developing policy, and that it follows that we don’t think it should develop policy on child maintenance… Where payments are reliable and regular, child maintenance provides parents with care with a separate income stream that may improve the lives and life chances of some children in or near poverty. We have concluded that child maintenance payments are estimated to have a small, non reportable impact on the number of families living in relative income poverty as currently measured and with current data sources.”
Yet three hours earlier, in the same chamber, with Lord Freud sitting directly behind him, Lord De Mauley had told Peers:
“When money is in payment, child maintenance averages around £32 per week, tax-free, under the CSA. This is a significant financial benefit to the most vulnerable mothers.”
At £32 per week, annual child maintenance would average £1,664. It is difficult to understand how Lord Freud could argue that this is trivial and insignificant, particularly for low income families. Over the nine year lifespan of the average case, this equates to just under £15,000 - enough, for example to pay for nearly two years’ university tuition fees. It is instructive that the people behind the sabotage of the Child Support Agency are the very same people shouting about social mobility and life chances. By framing the debate, and engineering poorer life chances, they look likely to prove their own claims that the children of single mothers have worse outcomes. In my own case, I am currently owed over £18,000 - enough for two years’ university tuition. Samantha Callan and Christian Guy will be pleased to hear that my extremely bright son has decided not to go to university because he fears getting into debt. Bingo.
In July 2012 Iain Duncan Smith presented to Parliament “Supporting separated families, securing children’s futures”, which revealed that CSA cases had an average liability of £33.40 per week.
An average CSA case lasts for nine years. This was established in the débâcle over the Government’s false claim about the cost of a typical CSA case.
So the amount of child maintenance payable over the lifetime of a CSA case is £15,631.
The British Religious Right is heavily involved in “research” to show how children raised by single mothers suffer adverse outcomes in adulthood compared to children brought up by married parents. The Child Poverty Act has been repealed, and single motherhood has replaced income as an official measure of child poverty. Christian Guy, CARE Leadership Programme graduate and former Director of the Centre for Social Justice, was a member of the Social Mobility Commission.
Annual tuition fees for university are £9,000. The £15,631 payable over the lifetime of an average CSA case equates to over half of the tuition fees payable on a three year degree course. My own son has already declared that he won’t be going to university because he has such a dread of the debt he would incur. The Government has deliberately deprived hundreds of thousands of children of single mothers from receiving an average of £15,631 in order to reduce their life chances and prove that “single mothers cause poverty”.
In October 2012 the Centre for Social Justice policy report, “Forgotten Families: The vanishing agenda”, compiled by Samantha Callan, acknowledged that:
“After a marital split, the income of women with children falls on average by more than a tenth (12 per cent), while separating fathers’ available income actually increases – by around a third (31 per cent).”
On 24 June 2015 Christian Guy’s Centre for Social Justice paper, Reforming the Child Poverty Act, urging the Government to repeal the Child Poverty Act, made it explicit that a primary aim of the repeal was to avoid the Government being subjected to judicial review if it failed to meet the target set out by law to eradicate child poverty by 2020.
In July 2015 George Osborne announced that any family which had a third child born after April 2017 would not qualify for child tax credit, which amounted to up to £2,780 a year per child.
In October 2015 Iain Duncan Smith told the Conservative Party Conference: "That’s what the limit on child tax credit for more than two children is about – bringing home to parents the reality that children cost money and if you have more kids you have to make the choices others make and not assume taxpayers money lets you avoid the consequences of such choices. That’s taking responsibility, and that’s fair.”
It is inconsistent of Iain Duncan Smith to chide couples and single mothers about the costs to the tax payer of raising children, but to deliberately engineer a situation where separated fathers do not have to pay anything to mothers towards the costs of raising their children.
In 2016, the Welfare Reform and Work Act abolished the Child Poverty Act 2010, which had been passed under the Labour Government with cross-party support. The Act removed the measure of poverty based on family income.
Mortgages and child maintenance
Some mortgage lenders refuse to take child maintenance payments into account when assessing affordability, but those that do will generally demand that they are supported by a statutory child maintenance arrangement rather than a “family based arrangement”, and will demand proof of several months of regular and full payments. Of course, this is yet another way in which the Government deliberately constrains the options of separated and divorced mothers. If mothers “put their children first” and go with “family based arrangements”, they will be discriminated against by mortgage lenders, even if fathers pay in full and on time. If mothers use the Child Maintenance Service, and fathers do not pay in full or on time - and the CMS refuses to use its enforcement powers - any income they do receive as child maintenance will be disregarded by mortgage lenders.
By reducing separated mothers’ housing options, the Government ensures that they are more likely to move into or remain in rented housing, in turn reducing their children’s life chances and social mobility. All part of the dastardly plan, naturally, to prove that the children of separated and divorced parents suffer worse adult outcomes.