The Committee's report examines the Government's proposals to reform the child support system, as set out in the White Paper "A new system of child maintenance" (Cm. 6979, ISBN 9780101697927) published in December 2006, and following on from the report by Sir David Henshaw (Cm. 6894, ISBN 9780101689427) published in July 2006. The Committee welcomes the Government's reform proposals, including the eventual replacement of the Child Support Agency by a new body (Child Maintenance and Enforcement Commission (C-MEC)) in 2008 and the fundamental shift proposed towards maintenance agreements privately agreed between parents. However, concerns are raised over the lack of detail for proper scrutiny of how the new system will work, particularly in relation to the provision of advice and guidance services. The report also highlights a number of inherent contradictions between the principles and practicalities of the proposals, for example how the reforms will impact on child poverty targets in relation to parents on welfare benefits, as well as regarding the transition arrangements for the transfer of existing cases onto the new scheme run by C-MEC. Concerns are also raised that whatever the merit of joint birth registration, tagging this highly sensitive matter onto child maintenance legislation will have wider ramifications for the family law system.

Nonpayment of child support is a reality of life in the 1990's. Most children living with only one parent live with their mother, and these families of women and children are four times more likely to suffer poverty than other families. This report -- resulting from a study by the Attorney General of Minnesota into the existing system of child support establishment, enforcement, and collection -- presents nine specific proposals aimed at simplifying the child support system, making it more effective at collecting support, and creatively tackling children's poverty as it relates to the nonpayment of support.

A new system for child support was introduced for new cases and those with links to new cases from 3 March 2003. There were new rules for child support and a simplified calculation of maintenance. In addition the Child Support Agency underwent substantial restructuring and introduced a new IT system. This was necessary because the Agency had been previously missing its targets, suffered from a large backlog of unprocessed cases and there was a low level of compliance from non-resident parents. However there have been problems implementing the reforms. This report provides an assessment of: what caused the problems; the impact on the quality of service provided to the customers; and actions taken by the Agency in response to the problems and the lessons learnt.

On August 22, 1996, President William Clinton signed into law the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act of 1996. Media and goververnment sources portrayed this act as the most important welfare reform since the passage of Social Security in the New Deal 61 years earlier. The hype around welfare reform overshadowed a significant section of the act entitled, “Title III—Child Support.” This section of the act made major changes in the child support program that is charged with the task of establishing, enforcing and modifying child support orders for children with non-residential parents. This book tells the story of the development and passage of the 1996 child support reforms.

Government's proposed child maintenance Reforms : Fifth report of session 2010-12, Vol. 2: Oral and written Evidence

The recent delegation of authority for welfare programs from the federal government to the states has stimulated increasingly complex and comprehensive reforms which seek in part to generate social messages that discourage dependency on public assistance, promote work, and influence family formation decisions. The message-sending emphasis of the new reforms and their comprehensiveness often makes them hard to evaluate through conventional experimental designs using treatment and control groups. This book offers a lucid discussion of issues involved in evaluating the new reforms, and applies those issues to the evaluation of welfare reform in one state, Wisconsin, which offers a leading example of comprehensive welfare reform. The book opens with an overview of the different types of program evaluation and summarizes clearly the basic issues that are involved in their conduct. A discussion of general evaluation strategies for the new welfare reforms, such as the selection and use of counterfactuals, is followed by consideration of both implementation and impact evaluations of the Wisconsin program. The final section considers the evaluation of specific impacts of the Wisconsin program on economic well-being, family structure, child care services, child support, child welfare, and children with disabilities.