‘CSA – where’s the saving?’

In an article in the Solicitors Journal of 23 September 2005, James Perrie commented that the Child Support Agency was introduced in order to replenish the treasury coffers, emptied by the demands of housing estate mums. He produced a table showing that the CSA had itself depleted those coffers by £145m in the year 2003, £179m in the year 2004 and last year by £208m. He quoted the Parliamentary All-Party Social Security Select Committee’s damning report that since 3 March 2003, the CSA’s performance has been woefully inadequate, focusing upon an outlay of £456m on a nonfunctioning computer system. Mr Perrie wrote that it was often difficult to tell from the CSA statistics, which confuse rather than clarify, just how many arrears are written off from the books each year (and how much is then being made up by compensatory payments funded by the taxpayer). The CSA’s own data showed probably uncollectible arrears as being £37.5m in 2003 and £58m in 2004, with the possibly uncollectible arrears for those years at a staggering £291.5m and £320.8m respectively. Resolution (the former SFLA) contends that the court should recover its powers to make awards for child support where it is already making substantive awards for spousal maintenance or to divide capital or share pensions. It asks why, if the court knows the realities, does the family have to face delay and repeat set-up disclosure and assessment in the CSA system? The CSA figure may well undermine the rest of the financial package. Although the proposal relates to an insignificant number of the 1.4 million cases handled by the CSA, Resolution believes that the change would remove a large proportion of the current ‘hard-to-settle’ cases that are clogging up the CSA’s processes.