Why was the Child Support Act introduced? Is it a Child Support Act or a means of Treasury support?

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The Organisation of Welfare:

Why was the Child Support Act introduced? Is it a Child Support Act or a means of Treasury support?

The Child Support Agency (CSA) was established in April 1993 as an executive agency of the Department of social security. The agency was set up to operate a system of child maintenance collection introduced by the Child Support Act 1991 with the intention of collecting maintenance money for the children of parents who do not live together. The establishment of this agency has been surrounded by controversy and criticism. This essay does not intend to detail the history of the Child Support Agency.  It intends to investigate why the Child Support Act was introduced. This will be achieved by looking at the background of the making of this piece of legislation. It also intends to address the main criticisms of the Act which are: whether or not the policy is in the best interest of the child as the preceding white paper claimed or whether it is merely a means of supporting treasury coffers.  The essay will also look at the problems the policy has created for the clients of the CSA. First of all it is necessary to define the term child support.

The term “child support” can be confusing as there is no set definition. The State does not appear to have a specific child support package. However, Bradshaw (93) in his International Comparison of Child Support, has defined State child support as consisting of: all social security benefits, benefits for lone parents, child support (maintenance) arrangements where they are guaranteed, economic arrangements that alleviate the impact of housing costs or reduce the costs of health care, schooling and pre-school child care. Parents see child support in moral, financial, emotional and developmental terms (NACSA).  Whereas children define child support as contact with both parents, meeting every day needs, parental guidance and relieving a few wants (Clarke,’96). The term child support will be defined for the purposes of this essay as it is under the Child Support Act 1991.  Which is that it is a parental responsibility to support their child/ren’s everyday needs where they are able to do so and not the State’s.

The State social security system has provided for needy children for the past 50 years so why should it have been changed? The Welfare State was created with the original intention of being insurance based with very little call for means tested benefits. However, the reality over time has been that more and more was demanded from State resources. This was due to the increasing aging population, long-term unemployment becoming the norm and the dramatic growth of lone parent families all looking to the state for financial support (Alcock,’87). The numbers of lone parents dependant upon Income Support grew from approximately 16% in 1961 to over 70% today (Bradshaw, ‘94, Moore, ’98).  In the 1970’s the increase was associated to a rise in the numbers of the divorced and separated. By the 1980’s the new growth was emerging from an abrupt increase in the proportion of never married lone mothers (Rowlingson, ’98). This was seen as a big problem as the sheer magnitude of the numbers of lone parent families claiming benefit became an enormous drain on state finances, as these women were not going out to work. Benefit expenditure on lone parents grew from £2.4bn 1978/9 to £6.6bn in1992/3(Bradshaw, ’94)).  Up until the 1980’s the Government’s response to the demands made was to plough more and more money into public expenditure. The Thatcher Government (elected in 1979) took a different approach. They considered the previous approach to be inefficient as no matter how much was put into financing lone parent families it did not seem to be improving their situation. Lone parent families were still some of the poorest families with children in the UK (Garnham ’94). The Child Support Act 1991 was just one of the many measures put in place by the Thatcher Government to reduce state dependency and promote efficient use of Treasury funds.

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Prior to the Act child support was collected through the courts and via the DSS. It has been suggested that the child support legislation was totally unnecessary in the UK as there was already, within the aforementioned elements, a settled structure for the parental maintenance of children  (Snow, ’98). The Government considered these systems to be failing. This was because the awards that the courts made were very low averaging at around £12 per week per for one child  (Garnham,’94), which, by no means reflected the true cost of a child. Only 30% of lone parents at any ...

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