Re Polly Toynbee’s article (Here’s one way to slash Britain’s rate of child poverty: stop dithering and make all fathers pay what’s due, 29 November), I was a liable relatives officer in the DWP for a number of years – the arrangement predated the Child Support Agency and was much more hands-on.
In this role, I prosecuted absent fathers (and occasionally mothers) for failing to maintain their children. Later, as a magistrate in the family court, I frequently enforced maintenance orders. The frustration was that many fathers leave one family and immediately start another. Typically this means that there are insufficient funds to support both, and it’s often the first family who suffer most.
Where men (and it usually is men) have enough income to pay for their children, it can be very difficult to establish how much cash is available. I had cases where, to dodge paying, men had given up work and even challenged the parentage of the children. Income can still be “deemed” to be available in such circumstances but enforcement wouldn’t be easy.
Cracking the problem needs a comprehensive approach. Boys should be educated from an early age that fathering a child comes with responsibilities that don’t end when a relationship founders. The benefit system should be revised so that payments for child maintenance can be deducted in the same way that fines and overpayments are recovered. Greater use should be made of attachment-of-earnings orders for those in employment, and for the self-employed recovery should be enforced with the same rigour that a tax debt would receive. In the last resort, failure to maintain should be dealt with by imprisonment.
Susan Donnelly
Prescot, Merseyside
