Lawyers were better! They really were.

Talk Politics are continuing to point out the absurdities of the Child Support Agency.
Rather an easy target.

I can remember when all maintenance disputes  were dealt with by courts. Lawyers would be paid for sorting these things out.  I don't know the exact costs to the Legal Aid fund but  the total must only be a minute proportion of the taxpayers money that has been chucked down the drain in establishing, altering, changing again and in all liklihood scrapping the bally mess and setting up Nuovo CSA!
It wasn't the Legal Aid costs that aggravated the Tories who set up the CSA. Who now can remember the White Paper, Children Come First Cmnd.1264, published in October  1990, in which it was noted in point 2 of the summary:-

The present system of maintenance is unnecessarily fragmented, uncertain in its results, slow and ineffective. It is based largely on discretion. The system is operated through the High and County Courts, the Magistrates’ Courts and the offices of the Department of Social Security. The cumulative effect is uncertainty and inconsistent decisions about how much maintenance should be paid. In a great many instances, the maintenance awarded is not paid or the payments fall into arrears and take weeks to re-establish. Only 30% of lone mothers and 3% of lone fathers receive regular maintenance for their children. More than 750,000 lone parents depend on income support. Many lone mothers want to go to work but do not feel able to do so."

The Government proposed that a Child Support Agency (the"CSA") be created which would:-

Ensure that parents honour their legal and moral responsibility to maintain their own children whenever they can afford to do so. It is right that other taxpayers should help to maintain children when the children�s own parents, despite their own best efforts, do not have enough resources to do so themselves. That will continue to be the case. But it is not right that taxpayers, who include other families, should shoulder that responsibility instead of parents who are able to do it themselves."

Compared with the CSA the Courts worked wonders!

 

Comments

[Unity]

Courts have one major redeeming virtue in dealing with child support issues - each case is dealt with individually and on merit.

That's the systemic problem that lies at the heart of the CSA's failure - you cannot reduce complex human interactions into a rule book and set of formulae that can be applied across the board by a bunch of clerks.

One size does not only not fit it all but it rarely fits anyone.

[Thersites]

From 'CSA costs more than it recovers' http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/4487202.stm

"The Child Support Agency's enforcement unit is costing more to run than it recovers from parents, it has emerged.

"The unit costs an estimated £12m a year to run, but managed to recover only £8m from absent parents last year."

and further on in the article, commenting more generally:

"Three weeks ago, the prime minister told MPs it was 'extremely difficult' to make the CSA -- an investigating, adjudicating and enforcement agency all in one -- cost-effective.

"He was responding to claims that £1 was spent by the agency on bureaucracy for every £1.85 that got through to children."