If past reforms are any indication, the government's plans to axe the CSA and start fresh might lead us in circles, says Angela Moores



So, once again the government is intending to tinker with the child maintenance administration that is currently the Child Support Agency (CSA). Last month, Work and Pensions Secretary John Hutton announced that the CSA will be replaced by a more streamlined and tougher body in line with Sir David Henshaw's independent report.



This CSA situation started 13 years ago, when the then-Conservative government thought it would be best to remove disputes about child maintenance from the family courts. While the judicial system was not ideal, it was relatively effective and cost efficient. The legal system had never been perfect, but then, what is?



In what way the CSA was intended to be better is difficult to tell. The CSA has a backlog of 300,000 cases. Was it intended to be a cheaper system in terms of cost? Unlikely, given that its computer and telephone system alone cost more than £456 million. The agency costs the taxpayer around £200 million a year, and currently has debts of £3 billion.



Having initially created maintenance criteria which were far too complicated to understand or calculate without the aid of a computer program, the government simplified the calculation, instead relying on a percentage of the paying party's net income, depending on how many children there were in the family. But while further reforms, such as reducing child maintenance for every night per week of contact, resolved one set of problems, they created a whole load more, such as more disputes over contact.



So where are we going this time? The Department for Work and Pensions is to consult widely over the summer with a White Paper to be published in the autumn. Sir David's key recommendations include parents being allowed to make their own private arrangements where possible. There will no longer be a need for benefit claimants to have automatic state involvement, and they would be entitled to keep more of the maintenance than at present to encourage payment. Those receiving large amounts of child maintenance would be restricted from claiming benefits.



Indeed, parents are to be encouraged to make private arrangements, which could be embodied in an enforceable consent order of the court. This could save a lot of time and money. For those not able to reach agreement and who have no access to the courts, the new body would provide a state-operated back-up system.



Where things seem to go awry is when it is proposed that the new state-administered system be given methods of enforcement - such as removing passports and imposing curfews on non-paying parents - that sound archaic, extremely costly and, dare one say, impractical. While enforcement was not one of the CSA's strong points, which clearly led to its downfall, I am not certain that the replacement methodology is any more likely to succeed.



Unless there is a great deal of practicality in enforcement, with experienced personnel in place to carry it through, we are just going to end up back in the same position in several years.



It is my experience, and that of many other family lawyers, that to date the greatest incentive for parents to make their own arrangements was the threat that if they did not, they would each have to deal with the CSA. Perhaps for that alone, the old system was not so bad after all.



Angela Moores is a partner and head of family law at north-west firm Ricksons