A bureaucrat's dream and a citizen's nightmare?

In March, the Government issued its long-awaited Green Paper, New Ambitions for Our Country: A New Contract for Welfare.

(Department of Social Security, New Ambitions for our Country: A New Contract for Welfare, March 1998, available from http;//www.dss.gov.uk/hq/wreform).

This document presages a major upheaval for the Child Support Agency:"Many parents succeed in frustrating the child support scheme: almost a third of fathers who should pay through the collection service are paying nothing.

To make matters worse, the complex and bureaucratic system faces opposition from both the person paying and, all too often, the parent providing the bulk of care -- We are conducting a 'root and branch' review of the CSA and we will announce proposals for fundamental reform later this year." (Ibid, ch 7, paras 16-17.)The Green Paper followed hot on the heels of a report on the CSA by the House of Commons Committee of Public Accounts, the latest in a series of indictments of the Agency by official watchdogs.

The Public Accounts Committee was appalled at the backlog of 407,000 cases awaiting initial assessment, more than half of which had been outstanding for over a year; it was "disturbed" that unpaid child support exceeded £1 billion, three-quarters of which the Agency did not expect to recover; and it was "deeply concerned" that in 85 per cent of cases the amount of debt owing by absent parents had been miscalculated -- one in six debt balances was wrong by more than one thousand pounds.

(House of Commons Committee of Public Accounts, Twenty-First Report, Child Support Agency: Client Funds Account 1996-97, HC 313, London: The Stationery Office, 1998, pp vi-vii.) The Committee, like other official bodies before it, called for more exacting targets on achieving accuracy and speed of assessments in future, as well as for urgent action to clear the backlog and to tackle the legacy of error.What has brought about this administrative breakdown and how realistic is it to expect significant i mprovement of the beleaguered Agency? If radical reform is required, what form should it take? It may be helpful to consider these questions from the point of view of those who have so far been denied a voice in the debate, the front-line Agency staff responsible for administering the Child Support Scheme.

In 1994 we received funding from the Nuffield Foundation to monitor the CSA.

We followed 123 cases involving a relationship breakdown where children were involved.

In twenty of these cases we were given permission by both parents to talk to Agency staff about the assessment and enforcement process and to review relevant case records.

We supplemented this case-monitoring with more general discussions with a range of Agency staff.

Our study, published this month as Child Support in Action, (Child Support in Action, written with Jacqueline Barron and Julie Bedward, is available from Hart Publishing (price £15).) has left us in no doubt that the problems of the Agency reflect inherent defects in the child support scheme itself, many of which can be attributed to political over-ambition.It is worth stressing that the problems that have beset the Agency were foreseen at the drafting stage.

The Government neither published nor summarised the responses received to its White Paper, Children Come First, but we were able to obtain copies of 31 of the 86 submissions made.

What they reveal is that all those who had any experience of dealing with the court-based system recognised from the outset that the targets set for the Agency were unrealistic -- a view trenchantly expressed by the Family Law Bar Association:"[The White Paper] suggests that the Agency would be able to carry out reassessment on an annual basis to take account of changes in income and liabilities.

We think this statement is staggeringly naive.

There are nearly 150,000 divorces annually in England and Wales and in the vast majority of them there are children involved.

To suggest that the Agency is going to be able to review each individual case on an annual basis, in addition to dealing with the workload involved in assessing the new ones, seems to us completely fanciful." (Submission of the Family Law Bar Association in Response to Children Come First, (1990), pp 5-6.)That the Government was unmoved by such warnings can be seen in the way it drove through the legislation.

With the Labour front bench reluctantly supporting the Bill, what little Parliamentary scrutiny there was came primarily from a handful of peers and backbenchers in the Commons.

For example, the then Conservative MP Emma Nicholson described the Bill as "a prescription for chaos, slackness and slowness", (Hansard, HC Debs, Vol 195, col 536, July 18, 1991.) whilst the detailed regulations made under the legislation were characterised by Lord Stoddart as "a bureaucrat's dream and a citizen's nightmare".

(Hansard, HL Debs, Vol 539, col 351, July 16, 1992.)The Child Support Act 1991 was intended to achieve both a significant shift in cultural attitudes towards parental responsibility and, by requiring absent parents to foot a Child Support Bill previously met by social security benefits, to produce significant savings for the Treasury.

(See A Garnham and E Knights, Putting the Treasury First: The Truth about Child Support, (London: Child Poverty Action Group, 1994).) When the Act was implemented, hundreds of new staff had to be recruited within a few months.

Many had no civil service experience, or, indeed, any work experience at all.

Staff training was not completed by the time the Agency began its oper ations, at which point it was required to take on a caseload that clearly exceeded its capacity.

As one officer told us:"We could see there were going to be major problems [when we started] and I don't now why these weren't foreseen at the drafting stage.

It just hasn't been thought out properly .

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if they had started off slowly, given us more time to get on our feet, sort out everything we were doing, rather than taking on such a huge deluge of cases which we can't handle .

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."These inexperienced officers were faced with a formula which required them to obtain and consider more than 100 pieces of information before an assessment could be made.

(This figure is taken from the House of Commons Committee of Public Accounts, op cit, p ix.) The complexity of the formula added significantly to the workload, such that one business team manager characterised the Agency at this point as "an absolute bloody shambles".Originally each person within a business team had their own caseload and was supposed to see a case through from start to finish.

But staff had insufficient training in many elements of the procedure with the result that cases were processed too slowly.

So a conveyor belt approach was introduced, termed "functionalisation" whereby each person carried out a particular task before passing the case down the line.

This allowed assessments to be made more quickly, thus giving the impression that the Agency was engineering payment of a large amount of child support.

Unfortunately, this way of working increased the scope for error, as child support officers acknowledged in interviews.

One commented:"-- functionalisation got the assessments out and the targets up, because that's what our Parliamentary people wanted us to do [but] when you have one person dabbling in one part and then it gets passed to another person who has a dabble, and then on to another person who has a dabble in another part, some of them will be all right, but unfortunately a lot of them aren't going to be spot on .

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How do you go back and say, 'This was done wrong.

How can we put it right?' We can't."Facing extreme political pressure, the Agency prioritised speed over accuracy.

One officer told us how guidelines as to the evidence required to determine wages were "put aside" because "what they wanted was as much work to be processed as quickly as possible." As is by now well known, the error rate was high.

This legacy of the Agency's early days has lingered on in multitudinous requests for reviews, in appeals, and in the manifold problems inherent in attempts to enforce incorrect assessments.Functionalisation also damaged relations with parents.

One officer admitted that because nobody "owns" a case, "people have been treated badly .

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there is not the same incentive [to be courteous] when there is a customer on the phone." More fundamentally, perhaps, staff were simply not able to provide information that parents sought because they lacked familiarity with any one case taken as a whole:"-- it's hard for us when they're shouting at us, screaming 'Why haven't you dealt with my case?', and it's the first time you've looked at it and you don't know anything about it, and they're blaming you for the inaction of the CSA."The Agency's staff were faced with an increasingly angry public.

We were told that disturbing or threatening phone calls were a major source of stress, and that the Agency had suffered high levels of absenteeism and staff turnover.

As it was put to us by one child support officer:"I've never known such wastage of staff .

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they don't seem to be worried about stress management control, when and why people are leaving, and you get so little support from management .

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we are very disillusioned, it's heartbreaking.

I go home at the end of the day with a splitting headache .

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and I just worry about the workload .

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a lot of people have gone off on long-term sick because of the stress, which is one of the problems that doesn't seem to be addressed at all -- we are always understaffed."Faced with an impossible caseload, the Agency abandoned any pretence of effective case management.

At the outset, staff were prompted by computer-generated "alerts" that a case required attention, but this system had quickly broken down, as had every subsequent attempt to manage the caseload.

This was how one officer recounted this story:"We were supposed to clear the alerts in the morning before we continued with any new work but .

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you couldn't keep on top so they decided to scrap them all in the end -- there were hundreds and hundreds and they were just blocking up the system, so every few weeks they'd just scrap all the alerts and start again.

And then they went on to the BF [brought forward] system whereby we're told to put dates on the folders and we just date everything when it had to come up again .

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then of course we got too many of those and we weren't actioning those either .

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We've got to the stage now where unless they actually write in or contact us, we're not dealing with cases at all .

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I've got so much post I can't keep on top of it.

So that's coming in daily and I've got hundreds of cases that need something doing to them on that basis.

At the end of the day there's just too much work for the amount of people who are here.

We're not giving a very good customer service because there is just too much work."Each administrative reorganisation exacerbated the very problem it had been designed to solve, as was made clear by another officer:"We were reorganising so much, the cases were just getting shoved in drawers and unless something cropped up, a lot of the time nothing happened on them.

At one time we just had thousands upon thousands of field cases piled up awaiting action.

We just shifted them around from field team to field team."Agency staff have also had to cope with successive attempts to reform the child support scheme.

Between 1994 and the spring of 1997 eight separate pieces of primary and secondary legislation gave rise to 62 changes in the basis for a child support assessment.

(House of Commons of Public Accounts, op cit, p ix.) Some were designed to simplify the work of the Agency but nearly all have made its task more difficult in the short-run, as staff have struggled to adapt to an administrative and legislative framework in constant flux.It is essential that a large dose of pragmatism accompanies the radical surgery foreshadowed by the Green Paper.

Experience of the UK scheme, and comparison with more successful experiments conducted overseas, especially in Australia, (See P Whiteford, "Implementing Child Support -- Are There Lessons from Australia?", Benefits, Sep/Oct 1994, p 3.) has led us inexorably to the view that both the formula and the system of reassessment and review are too complex, and that parents lack appropriate incentives to cooperate with the Agency.

We believe the formula must be simplified and the central principle become that of deducting a specified percentage of income according to the number of children involved, together with the introduction of a disregard of maintenance payments when c alculating Income Support entitlement so as to provide a real incentive for mothers to cooperate and for fathers to pay.

Furthermore, as far as is practical, maintenance should be collected by the Inland Revenue through the PAYE system.

We would then anticipate lower child support assessments but higher levels of payment, greater benefit savings, and lower administrative costs.The strategy for implementing a reformed child support scheme must also be pragmatic.

Two years ago the Ombudsman pinpointed the major defects in the planning stage and in the priorities adopted within the child support scheme:"Maladministration leading to injustice is likely to arise when a new administrative task is not tested first by a pilot project; when new staff, perhaps inadequately trained, form a substantial fraction of the workforce; where procedures and technology supporting them are untried; and where quality of service is subordinated to sheer throughput." (Parliamentary Commissioner for Administration, Third Report, 1995-6, Investigation of complaints against the Child Support Agency, London HMSO, 1996.)It is to be hoped that these lessons have been learnt, and learnt well.There remains a risk that proposals for root and branch changes will receive inadequate Parliamentary scrutiny, particularly given Labour's large majority in the House of Commons.

It is vital that the Government does not repeat the error of a previous administration by assuming that it knows best.

Before introducing its proposals to Parliament it should consult widely and allow ample time for debate and mature reflection.