Blair and Howard clash over child support
The Prime Minister Tony Blair today told MPs that the state of the Child Support Agency was “unacceptable”.
Work and Pensions Secretary Alan Johnson earlier revealed that CSA chief executive Doug Smith had resigned.
And Mr Blair faced tough questions over the state of the CSA from Conservative leader Michael Howard and Liberal Democrat leader Charles Kennedy during Prime Minister’s question time.
Mr Howard asked the Prime Minister what he planned to do to get a grip on the problems with the CSA. Mr Blair replied that firstly the failings of the £456 million IT system needed to be tackled, and secondly there were over a million cases being dealt with by the old system – inherited from the Conservatives – that needed to be migrated to the new system over time.
Mr Howard reminded the Prime Minister that his Government had now been in office for over seven and a half years. Mr Blair conceded that what had happened was “unacceptable”, but added: “What I will not do is take lessons from a Conservative party that introduced a child support system that was a byword for chaos and unfairness”.
Charles Kennedy went a step further than Mr Howard and called for the CSA to be scrapped and its functions transferred to the Inland Revenue. Mr Blair expressed doubt that this would be the solution, instead wanting to sort out the problems of the current system.
Mr Kennedy also raised the resignation of the managing director of the National Assessment Agency on Wednesday morning, and suggested it was indicative of a central problem with a Government that set unrealistic targets.
In a later exchange, Mr Howard pressed Mr Blair over police form-filling, noting that from today the Metropolitan police would have to fill in a form every time they stopped someone in the street.
The Police Federation estimated that it would take seven minutes to fill in one of these forms, Mr Howard explained, so if a policeman stopped a gang of half a dozen yobs, he would spend an hour filling in a form.
Mr Blair explained that the measure was introduced as a result of the Lawrence inquiry and was necessary to ensure there was proper support for the police in the local communities.
