So, the Government has finally announced what it had already decided as long ago as 2004.  The Child Support Agency (CSA) is to be axed.

The original scheme was the brainchild of the Conservative Government of Mrs Thatcher.  It was designed to bring some semblance of consistency to the making of child maintenance assessments, get lawyers out of the process and thereby reduce the cost to the Legal Aid Fund and generally.  It was also to ensure prompt and complete recovery of maintenance assessments made, something that the Court system (usually the Magistrates’ Court) was criticised for not having done effectively. A new concept was introduced too, that any child maintenance assessment made should reflect the actual financial cost of raising a child.

Extraordinarily, the coming of the Child Support Agency glided beneath the radar of most of those professionals who could have pointed out that the idea had some very basic but fatal, flaws.  The very factor that made the wheel fall off in so many Court enforcement proceedings was rearing to cause similar mayhem within the child support system.  The only difference was that the Court had considerable experience in dealing with recalcitrant payers.

It was so obvious that the Child Support Agency should prove so ineffective in recovering maintenance from “absent parents”.  It was even plainer that the Agency’s staff would become demoralised by their inability to make the system work and the criticism to which they became subjected from all quarters by reason of that failure.  What was not so clear at first was that the Agency should prove to be such a monumental waste of money.   Nevertheless, even before John Major’s Administration had quietly slipped beneath the waves it had become patently clear that the concept of a Child Support Agency was “broke” and yet Mr Blair’s Government persevered with it for nine more long years.

Today we were informed by  Work and Pensions Secretary, John Hutton that the Agency will be replaced by a new “smaller, more focused” body as part of a radical reform of the maintenance system, but not yet.  We shall have to await the publication of a new White Paper later this year “setting out in greater detail the Government's plans.” 

The Child Support Agency saga is an all too conspicuous example of how incompetent this Government has become.