[[It’s Christmas Eve. Last minute shopping beckons; you feed your youngest – an almost unreasonably hungry six-month old baby boy, before wrapping him and his sister up warm and heading in to town. You haven’t seen your husband for a day or so, and he isn’t answering his phone. Unsettling, but sadly not unusual.
The cash machine advises you that your joint account is empty. This is unusual. Your husband has just been paid. Your rent is due. The cupboards are empty. A bank error, you reassure yourself.
The cashier advises that your husband withdrew the lot and closed the account the day before. He still isn’t answering his phone.
Fast forward thirteen years and the children haven’t seen him. It’s not for want of trying. One has had a diagnosis of autism, which he knows about. Still nothing. He makes arrangements to visit, and breaks them. Your eldest is just old enough to know and to miss her daddy. She wails inconsolably every time he doesn’t show. After a while he stops making arrangements.
He owes you nearly £80,000; it’s a debt enforceable in law. He’s earned the money but he hasn’t paid it. You can see his Facebook photos of the foreign holidays he’s been on. The Child Support Agency explains that the courts have prevented them from taking driving licences away from people like him or from imposing custodial sentences. Something to do with his rights, which seem to mean more than his children’s needs. So there isn’t anything much they can do. And there is at least £4 billion owed to people like you.
And you wonder; if I’d left my children homeless and hungry on Christmas Eve – even for a day – would I have been prosecuted for neglect? And why, in the 21st century, isn’t it socially unacceptable to abandon your children and not pay towards their needs when you have the means to?
Gingerbread, the charity for single parent families, has found that the agency that replaced the CSA, the Child Maintenance Service, is collecting an even smaller proportion of maintenance due to parents. Between March 2014-2015, it collected just over half of the payments that were due.
Billions of pounds of taxpayers’ money have been spent trying to collect money that has been earned and that is owed. Clearly, there is a limit to what any state agency can do. But legislation can change social attitudes. Drink-driving is now considered unacceptable. Few would argue for the right not to secure their children with seatbelts. If the law said that those who can pay, but don’t pay, towards what their children need were guilty of neglect – or even financial abuse towards the resident parent – perhaps attitudes might change.
Perhaps, too, the hundreds of millions that are spent trying and failing to force people to do the right thing could then be spent on things that will benefit young people – such as affordable housing, social care and spending on mental health services.]]