U.K. SUPPORT AGENCY'S ANTICS CAUSE HOWLS OF OUTRAGE

After years of hearing judges and others say that such matters as child support "should just be turned over to an administrative agency," the government of Great Britain, which in many ways acts like that of a big American state, decided to try it. As is its usual wont, Parliament adopted a delayed-action statute due to be triggered by quiet administrative action several years into the future, and one day Britons woke up to find they had an administrative agency not only enforcing, but also determining the amount of, child support payments.

If recent reports in the London Times can be believed, the citizenry at large have found themselves less than happy with the result. A series of virtuoso performances by the agency in the last few days, which range from the wildly high-handed to the run-of-the-mill outrageousness that would scarcely raise an eyebrow in some of the more jaded United States, have British citizens so astounded and infuriated that they are calling for the agency's abolition.

GOING FOR EASY TARGETS

A series of five recent articles and an editorial in the Times of London seems to indicate that outrage runs deepest over the fundamental public policy issue of legislative prevarication and betrayal. Parliament, and presumably the citizens, were sold on the idea of creating the Child Support Agency by the highly publicized image of defiant deadbeats who live luxuriously and pay zero support while their ex-families starve. Now instead it seems the agency is accused of ignoring those difficult fugitive-location and enforcement cases, and concentrating instead on attacking much easier targets among middle-class and working-class fathers who have always paid their child support faithfully but in the agency's opinion weren't ordered to pay enough.

It has mightily offended journalists, anti-agency activists and "angry MPs" that the agency told a North-Country truck driver who could not afford to pay the jacked-up support payments that he should save money by exercising less of his court-ordered visitation. The agency's arrogant reaction to criticism of this case seems not to have helped it very much in the struggle to get its view of the competing equities accepted by the public.

QUESTIONABLE TACTICS

Then some particularly British sense of fair play was deeply offended by the maneuvering that the CSA went through to get into a support case wherein it would otherwise not have been involved. The legislation establishing the agency provided that for a transition period until 1996, it is not supposed to interfere in cases where a support order from the courts already exists. The father successfully challenged in court the agency's involvement in the case by showing that it had advised his ex-wife on a telephone "help line" to adopt a tactic so devious that it apparently struck a national nerve. Since the father had been regularly paying his £123 court ordered support, the help line counselors advised the woman to go into court and ask to have her support order revoked, so that she could then claim she was receiving no support and the agency could enter the case. Upon doing so it issued an administrative support order calling for four times the prior amount. The father managed to get before a judge who threw out the new maintenance order as being "not necessarily in the best interests of the children." Ever defiant, the agency told the Times that it would continue to advise the same strategy to help line callers, and this triggered an investigation by the Prime Minister's Office and a House of Commons committee, along with calls for abolition of the program.

Concern has been expressed in the press for fathers who have no money left to support second-family children, and others who had turned over all property to their former wives in exchange for having no support order, as well as those who are unable to pay high support because they are still paying off debts that they assumed in the original divorce settlement.

The strains that child support agency pursuit can put on a second marriage were the focus of complaints about a Lincolnshire warehouse man who was divorced in 1987, giving the wife essentially everything and assuming a £20 per week support obligation. Agency demands for increased support in his case have aroused particular sympathy among the many local chapters of a new organization of payor spouses and their new partners, led by a Lincolnshire fire chief and named Absent Parents Asking for Reasonable Treatment (APART). This father, Malcolm Jones, who was recently notified that the agency was raising his support bill from £200 a month to almost £500, is urging all of his troops to confront Parliament with the desperation of their plight.

MAGAZINE INVESTIGATES

Meanwhile The Spectator dug further into the issues and produced an article with more surprises. After carefully documenting its case that the legislation was sold to Parliament as a means of finding long-lost deadbeat dads, it discovered an internal CSA memo stressing that the agency personnel should not bother with those cases, "which will need a lot of effort to extract money. The name of the game is maximising the maintenance yield -- don't waste a lot of time on the non-profitable stuff!" Another such memo set forth as first priority divorced fathers who are working and making higher than average earnings, and second priority divorced fathers who have regular contact with the custodial parent. It also found that one of the six regional child support agency centers employs 500 people, but virtually all of those employees are working on increasing the amount of the child support payments from fathers who are already paying it.

The Spectator article cited the CSA's publicity saying it was created to remedy a situation where "less than one in three absent parents pays any regular maintenance to support their children," but its investigation found that most of the other two-thirds of divorced fathers, who were thus portrayed by CSA as callous deadbeats were in fact the recipients of "clean-break divorce settlements" in earlier decades. The British government and its courts had strongly urged clean-break settlements throughout the 1980s and later 1970s on the ground that if a father made a lump-sum transfer (such as the entire family home), in return for release from support obligations, this arrangement would be more reliable and less liable to generate years of further litigation. They were particularly pushed in the north of England where wages were so low and continued employment so precarious that securing assets seemed a far better deal than securing a support order. However, the men who made clean break settlements in earlier years were targeted by the CSA as the most obvious source of easy money. The law gave it the power to overturn the previous pre-incorporated settlements and demand that those fathers now start paying regular support.

Looking about in the northern counties The Spectator found a father who had had his support bill tripled so as to leave him only £3 a week after paying his mortgage. The CSA had advised him to sell his house. But another worker from the Scottish border regions proved a somewhat tougher customer and may prove a national embarrassment for the British government. His ex-wife insisted she was still happy with the original clean-break deal whereby she got the house, but the CSA told her that unless she authorized it to pursue support payments, she would have to forfeit all welfare (income support). However, the man's lawyer surprised the CSA by taking the case to court. She argues that since the CSA support demand annuls the original deal, the ex-husband has a right to get the house back -- in the form of at least half the proceeds of its long-ago sale.

When the CSA's nullifying approach to clean-break settlements was first criticized, it replied that the divorcing fathers should have thought about the government policy of the 1990s back when they made their divorce settlements in the 80s, but the CSA does not seem to have thought ahead as to the possibility and the results of cases such as this one. If mothers do have to give back the proceeds of their long-past settlements, they would probably be more dependent than ever on welfare payments, The Spectator opined.

Meanwhile, the CSA has been going after men who successfully defended paternity suits, demanding that they pay maintenance for support of children that the courts have ruled belong to some other father. The Spectator also found several men whose maintenance payments have quadrupled, with no account taken of existing debts or the presence of second families. CSA orders can be appealed, but only on the grounds of a mistake in calculations of the payment, and not on grounds of inability to pay. The CSA has found itself demanding that fathers break off contact with their first families, so that they cannot claim visitation expenses, and it apparently is finding that many choose unemployment when that is the only way they can find to escape the agency's demands for money.

[Site Manager's update: After a few months of such outrages, Parliament drastically reformed the child support agency, stripped it of several of its powers, and made it change its guidelines to allow for fathers' visitation expenses and the needs of their second families. In Britain the cycle of reform and counter-reform can accomplish in months what takes a couple decades in the States, because not only their government but also their press is far more centralized, focused and responsive (to some things) than ours. For more on these events see John Crouch's Law World .]