Northern Ireland Assembly Flax Flower Logo
  1. How many staff are involved in the contract for the Eastern England operation? How much is the total operation worth to the Belfast Centre?
  1. Of the total 1400 CSA staff in Belfast, 950 operate the Eastern England contract. The total value is £33m, which includes £17m for the back-office operations and £9m for the front operation in Eastern England.
  1. How long is the contract for? What is the caseload for the Belfast operation and how do you project figures forward?
  1. The contract initially signed in 1991 was not signed on commercial terms ans is not time-bound. The current caseload for NI is 31,000 and expected to rise to 40,000 in two year's time. This represents 49,000 children. The caseload for the Eastern England business is 180,000, expected to rise to 220,000 in the same period. The figures are forecast by the NI Statistics Research Agency, which takes account of factors such as teenage pregnancy rates and breakdowns of stable relationships.
  1. Are the big majority of the parents you deal with in NI claiming some sort of benefit? If so, how is the system really helping children in poverty especially if both the parent with care and the absent parent both claim benefit?
  1. Quite a high proportion of parents are on benefit. The CSA was introduced because the old courts system was becoming increasingly ineffective, with awards highly inconsistent. The Treasury wanted to ensure that the taxpayer was not going to featherbed the non-compliants. A new Bill is to be introduced in Westminster with a view to standardising the system through a fixed formula , which will be much simplified. Absent parents claiming benefit will have to pay a £5 contribution to the upkeep of their child under the new scheme. Organisations such as Gingerbread and the CPAG advocated otherwise but the Government insisted that all parents must make a contribution.
  1. If a child does not directly benefit from an absent parent's contribution ( for example, if it is simply going into the Treasury coffers), why should that parent pay it? There is no incentive.
  1. The original policy intention was that the money would go to the children but the Treasury intervened to say that all parents should pay. The reforms due in 2002 will man for a much simpler system, which will allow a parent on benefit a weekly £10 disregard on contributions from the absent parent.
  1. What percentage of your absent parents are on benefit? If this new scheme starts to hit these people harder, albeit by only £5 per week, any children living with them will be punished in effect? That does not seem fair.
  1. I cannot comment on policy.
  1. There are two major complaints about the CSA: the fact that there is no standardised way of calculating payments; and the Agency's poor track record on tracing absebt parents. How do you work out contributions? How many cases in NI each are you unable to trace?
  1. In NI we try to trace 1000 absent parents each year with a 50% success rate; the corresponding figure for Eastern England is 40%.

The complexity of the present scheme which takes account of both parents incomes and requires 100 pieces of information is recognised as a major problem, which s why it is to be overhauled very soon. Under the new scheme there are two major improvements. Only the income of the absent parent will be taken into account. Also the formula will be much simpler: a parent with one child will pay 15% of net income; with two children the rate rises to 20%; and with three or more , the figure is 25%. This will lead to vastly reduced assessment times from the current average of 24 weeks, which leads to further complications when an absent parent is suddenly faced with a massive contribution bill.

  1. Is the NI CSA operation more effective than the GB one and ,if so, could more work be relocated? There seems to be a lack of face-to-face work in terms of trying to track defaulters. Do you feel that you have made a positive contribution to this area in hindsight?
  1. The statistics show that the NI operation compares well with the GB service, and that includes our own service to Eastern England. However, there is considerable room for improvement if more jobs are to be secured. There would also be some resentment in Eastern England if more jobs there were shed to Belfast. There are seven regional offices in NI for face-to-face interviews. The self-employed are the biggest culprits in non-compliance and are extremely difficult to trace.

I feel that the NI CSA |has been a success and has provided 900-odd quality jobs funded by GB, which are secure. The NI operation is meeting most of its targets and staff are imbued with the ethos of always treating people decently. The new scheme will also give parents with care a better deal.

  1. The NI operation costs £8m p.a. but only collects £14m: this seems very expensive?
  1. Our staff each collect £48,000 pa in the NI operation but £90,000 in the GB one. But this is accounted for by the difference in maintenance assessment sizes and also the smaller proportion of parents in GB paying nothing- 65% of the NI cases are on Income Support. In terms of efficiency measurements, the NI CSA's liveload has increased by 53% since its inception while staff numbers have gone up by 8% with an increase in spend of 17%.
  1. Given the high percentage of your caseload on low incomes, I do not se much emphasis on targeting social need.
  1. The CSA does co-operate with the Social Security Agency in developing relevant TSN targets. But while the SSA is primarily concerned with paying benefits, the CSA is merely a collection agency and can only disperse what it collects.
  1. How do your running costs compare with the GB centres? Is there any danger that the work may be taken away?
  1. The contract cost out of Belfast is the same as for the GB sites so there is no threat on a competitiveness basis. In fact, this year, to give us a competitive edge, we are returning a 1% allowance that Belfast always previously received to take account of grade differentials.
  1. Has any independent analysis been done on the potential impact of the new scheme for the NI situation. If so, how do the legislative proposals fit with our local profile of a very high percentage rate of parents on benefit?
  1. My understanding is that no independent research has been undertaken for NI because of the parity situation with GB. There was almost universal welcome for the fixed rate contribution proposal, but there were only three submissions from NI including the Law Society and Gingerbread.

Social Development Minutes 3 February 2000