C-MEC Depression

I've been meaning to post about an article that appeared in the Comment column of the Gazette on the 11th January. As I mentioned in my 1st birthday post below, the general consensus seems to be that C-MEC is no more likely to succeed than the Child Support Agency that it will replace. This pessimistic outlook is supported by the views given by Stephen Lawson, a member of Resolution's national committee for maintenance and the CSA, in this article. He makes some good points, such as about the premise that C-MEC will have a smaller caseload because parents will be encouraged to make private arrangements. He points out that there is no proposal "for any private arrangement to be registered with C-MEC, so that if a private arrangement breaks down, it seems that a fresh application would have to be made to C-MEC – putting the parties in precisely the position that they would have been in had they made an application to C-MEC in the first instance".

However, what is most worrying, he says, "is the proposal to give C-MEC powers of ‘administrative enforcement’ – without having to progress default cases through the courts", despite the fact that more than half of the CSA's maintenance assessments reviewed by the Audit Office in 2004/5 were found to contain errors: "The CSA says it owes no ‘duty of care’, so it is not liable to pay compensation when errors occur – and despite this appalling history, the government wants to reduce the right of a citizen to have cases heard in court."

The more I think about the proposals, the more depressed I get. Is it not beyond the wit of those in government to come up with a better, fairer and, above all, workable, system? If not, then we should just scrap the whole idea and go back to an entirely court - based system. Oh no, sorry, we can't do that - it would cost too much.