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Socialist Review Index (1993–1996) | Socialist Review 172 Contents
From Socialist Review, No. 172, February 1994.
Copyright © Socialist Review.
Copied with thanks from the Socialist Review Archive.
Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
The sense of injustice and anger felt by many victims of the government’s Child Support Agency has not diminished. Indeed, as more cases of severe financial hardship and even suicide brought on by the Agency’s policies come to light, the campaign against it is gaining momentum.
The Agency has always been portrayed as forcing absent parents (overwhelmingly fathers) to pay maintenance for their children. The implication from ministers has always been that its emphasis would be on squeezing some money for maintenance from those who pay nothing.
In fact, as Agency head Ros Hepplewhite pointed out as long ago as 1992, ‘it is going to be quite a shock to a large number of parents currently paying maintenance to find that this agency is actually dealing with them and that they are expected to pay significantly more.’
Last September the Agency admitted it was actually targeting those already paying in order to meet the amount set for collection. So many parents have found their maintenance levels doubled or trebled by the Agency, causing them – and often their second families – real hardship.
Those fathers who are themselves on benefit are in no position to pay any significant maintenance costs, as even the government recognises. So while they are denounced as ‘feckless’ the truth is they are unable to pay from levels of benefit which are only at subsistence standard.
The argument in favour of the Agency is that it helps deserted women and children. Indeed, the Tories are all too happy to use feminist arguments in support of their draconian laws. The reality is that mothers find themselves subject to all sorts of pressure and harassment from the DSS. They are forced to name absent fathers, often against their will, and run the risk of violent ex-partners blaming them for the high costs imposed by the Agency.
Of course it is true that many women want former husbands or boyfriends to pay at least some maintenance, and resent these men having money while they struggle on benefits. But there are equally many women who want nothing to do with the fathers of their children, for a whole number of perfectly sensible reasons.
Either way, the Child Support Agency will not help them. Higher maintenance payments go overwhelmingly not to the mothers and children but to the Treasury. Most women are no better and sometimes worse off. The Treasury gets all the maintenance if the mother is on income support and most of it if she’s on family credit, a student grant or disability allowance. Women who refuse to disclose the father have been threatened with losing all benefits.
It is also sometimes argued that the main objectors to the Child Support Agency are comfortable middle class men who want to maintain rich lifestyles. This argument is fuelled by some of the reactionary men such as those in Families Need Fathers – a right wing pressure group arguing for ‘men’s rights’ – who simply want to attack women, and by campaigns such as those run in the Daily Mail which target ‘the worst kind of feckless fathers’ and want more energy put into tracking them down.
Yet it is clear that most campaigners are not out and out reactionaries. Indeed the Campaign against the Child Support Act puts a lot of emphasis on the way the law attacks mothers. The Labour Party conference has voted to scrap the act.
This piece of retrogressive legislation will hit workers much harder than the middle classes. Figures given when the act came into force showed that a man on £12,000 a year was liable to pay £65.99 per child under 11 while one on £40,000 a year plus was liable for £137.70.
Already there are many men assessed under the act who are refusing to pay and likening the campaign to that over the poll tax. Will they succeed?
The Tories’ aim is to force more people off benefits and to push childcare costs onto individual men and women. But it is one thing moralising about ‘feckless fathers’, it is quite another to enforce this level of payment.
Ros Hepplewhite has said that ‘paying maintenance will become like paying income tax.’ Taxation already stands at higher levels than when the last Labour government fell in 1979. Most workers pay approaching a third of their income in taxation. Many simply cannot afford to pay much more when housing and other living costs are taken into account.
Karl Marx wrote 150 years ago that the wage only covers the cost of reproduction of the worker. Most workers cannot begin to support two families, which is why so many cannot pay much more than a few pounds a week. If the level of maintenance is enforced it will drive thousands of men and their second families into terrible poverty.
There is of course a solution to the problem – funding single parents. Every mother caring for children should have the option of decent state benefits, not the average £70 a week that a woman with a child receives at present. And there should be adequate state childcare for those mothers who want to escape the poverty of living on benefits, but whose low wages put childcare completely out of reach at present.
The one parent family group in Scotland, One Plus, recently reported that ‘over the past year, One Plus has seen a 50 percent increase in inquiries from lone mothers about training, education and employment.’ Resources would be far better going into these areas than into hounding parents and blaming them for the problems of the family.
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