Mr. R?n?n Hession:

On the efforts to seek maintenance, what had been applying up to now is a one-parent family payment. For a person was applying for a payment from our Department, going back to the early 1990s, the regime that had been in place was that we wanted to make sure that person got as much maintenance as possible through the system. Some of it would qualify as income, which would then affect that person’s payment. That was the intention behind it. However, what happened in practice was that people came to us looking for a payment who were probably already having difficulty getting payment from the other parent and had to go back to court, not so much to get the payment itself but to go through a process to satisfy our Department. The review group found that did not improve the situation and did not lead to any increase in maintenance; it just created an extra, stressful step that was best removed. Obviously, this is a very recent change. To be honest, the data on maintenance, as we see in the review group report, is not great through the court system. It would not come through us, necessarily. It would be more through the court service.

The Department of Justice is doing a review of enforcement and looking at those mechanisms. As I understand it, that is close to finalisation. We might get some insight from that. Broadly speaking, our experience over the years was that this was not a very effective way of getting the money flowing from one parent to the other, rather, it was just an extra step. As the Deputy said, this is already a cohort at risk of poverty. They are parenting alone with many other pressures. It did not serve its intended purpose to lead to increased maintenance payments.

Therefore, we do not think that will be a consequence of this but it is too hard to say in terms of data.

We will see what the Department of Justice comes up with in its report.