The sham consultation on child maintenance reform
On 13 January 2011 the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, Iain Duncan Smith, presented to Parliament his Green Paper, “Strengthening families, promoting parental responsibility: the future of child maintenance”, launching a consultation open until 7 April 2011.
The consultation was a sham.
The Green Paper proposed to close the Child Support Agency and encourage separated parents to make “family based arrangements” around child maintenance instead. A smaller statutory system with better links to HM Revenue & Customs would replace the CSA, but a £100 application fee, plus administration fees of up to 12 percent for parents with care and 20 percent for non-resident parents, would deter separated parents from using it “unnecessarily” (even though the DWP’s own research showed parents only used the CSA as a last resort).
Three organisations were profiled in the green paper. The first was “national charity”, the Centre for Separated Families. The second was Couple Connection. Both had longstanding connections with Samantha Callan.
It is difficult to understand how Iain Duncan Smith could justify calling the Centre for Separated Families a “national charity”. Having bled the charity dry for years, Karen and Nick Woodall had relinquished their York premises and made all their staff redundant, apart from one administrator, and owed £164,000 to HM Revenue & Customs.
Couple Connection was a project of One Plus One, run by Penny Mansfield, who had longstanding links with Christian fundamentalists associated with Samantha Callan, who Iain Duncan Smith brought over from the Centre for Social Justice to be his Special Adviser at the Department for Work and Pensions.
Both Nick Woodall of the Centre for Separated Families and Penny Mansfield of One Plus One gave presentations about their services at a conference called “What works in Relationship Education? Lessons from academics and service deliverers in the US and Europe”, held over two days on 17-18 September 2008. The conference was “organised by Care for the Family at the request of the Doha Institute for Family Studies and Development”, “held in the Jubilee Room in Westminster”, “chaired by Samantha Callan”, and “sponsored by the All Party Parliamentary Group on Sustainable Relationships”, whose chairman, Andrew Selous MP, showed the overseas visitors around the Houses of Parliament on the second day. Andrew Selous is a key member of the British Religious Right within Parliament.
Harry Benson, Deputy Chair of the Centre for Social Justice’s Family Breakdown Working Group, also gave a presentation about relationship education for new mothers.
One Plus one, the Centre for Separated Families and Harry Benson (via Care for the Family) all received funding under the category of “families and relationships” in the Department for Education Voluntary and Community Sector grant announced by Education Minister Tim Loughton on 25 February 2011.
This shows that plans to apportion funding for relationship support had already been laid in 2008, underlying the mendaciousness of the claim, in Iain Duncan Smith’s Green Paper, that “Central to our approach to reform is an integrated model of relationship and family support services, which helps parents make their own, lasting arrangements”. There was never any intention to put substantial resources into helping separated parents make “family based arrangements” for child maintenance: it was simply a ruse to leverage £30 million out of the Department for Education for Samantha Callan’s friends.
Iain Duncan Smith’s Green Paper was greeted with outrage and consternation from single mothers and their representatives. But, as the order of events shows, there was never any intention of listening to the women who would be adversely affected by the proposals. The decisions had already been made some time before.
Time line
On 18 November 2010 Maria Miller met the Centre for Separated Families and seventeen other organisations to discuss child maintenance. In the Equality Impact Assessment for the Green Paper (incidentally, note that it is mis-dated as 13 January 2010 rather than 13 January 2011, which reinforces the impression that it was a rote formality rather than a meaningful assessment), the meeting was described thus:
“A roundtable event to discuss the possible integration of information and support services for separating and separated families was chaired by Maria Miller MP, Minister for Disabled People with responsibility for child maintenance, on 18 November 2010. This event specifically focused on proposals outlined in Chapter 1 of the consultation – discussing the support separating and separated families need and how this can best be provided. This was attended by voluntary and community sector organisations who have interest and expertise in providing support to these families. Attendees included those who represent the interests of mothers and fathers as well as grandparents and helped inform initial proposals. The event was also attended by officials from the Ministry of Justice, Department for Education and Cabinet Office as these proposals are being developed in conjunction with those who have relevant knowledge across Government.”
In January 2011 Maria Miller met the Centre for Separated Families for a second time to discuss the proposed child maintenance reforms - the first external organisation she met with to propose the reforms - and the only one she met with during January.
On 13 January 2011 Iain Duncan Smith presented the Green Paper to Parliament and opened the consultation.
On 25 February 2011 Education Minister Tim Loughton announced the successful organisations awarded funding under the Voluntary and Community Sector grant for 2011 to 2013. Several of those organisations who would supply optimistic quotes for the Government’s response to the consultation were awarded large grants.
In March 2011 Maria Miller met the Centre for Separated Families for a third time to discuss the proposed child maintenance reforms. Karen and Nick Woodall were the only people she met with more than once to discuss the reforms.
On 15 June 2011 Maria Miller told the Work and Pensions Committee: “We had around seven hundred responses” to the consultation.
On 12 July 2011 Iain Duncan Smith presented to Parliament the “Government’s response to the consultation on Strengthening families, promoting parental responsibility: the future of child maintenance”, which is full of optimistic quotes from organisations in favour of the proposed reforms.
My analysis can be downloaded here.
The document gave thirty-one quotes from seventeen organisations, selected from the “around seven hundred responses”.
“We received 716 responses to the consultation, including 649 responses from individuals. 167 of the responses from individuals were standard responses. 67 organisations formally responded. In addition, we met four organisations who did not respond formally, but whose views were considered. A number of Members of Parliament and Honourable Lords also commented formally.”
Of these, four quotes were from the Centre for Separated Families, three quotes were from Care for the Family, and one quote was from the Centre for Social Justice.
Samantha Callan was in cahoots with Karen and Nick Woodall, she had worked with Care for the Family since at least 2002 (see her treatise on the history of marriage, copyright Care for the Family), and she had worked with the Centre for Social Justice since around 2005. This screen shot of a search engine result (sadly, I can’t reproduce the result as I can’t remember what terms I searched) shows that Samantha Callan wrote the Centre for Social Justice’s official response to the consultation.
Thus at least seven of the 31 quotes - over a quarter - came from the very same people who were driving the child maintenance reform proposals.
Interestingly, of four quotes in total mentioning domestic violence, two of the quotes - from the Centre for Social Justice and Families Need Fathers - raised the spectre of false allegations of domestic violence being made by mothers in order to avoid the proposed application fee for the new statutory service. False allegations are a perennial obsession of men’s rights activists.
Anne Longfield at 4Children provided one concerned and two positive quotes, hoping (like Karen and Nick Woodall) to expand her charity to convert Sure Start children’s centres into Australian-style “family relationship centres”:
“Having a single virtual hub for information with clear signposting will help families access services sooner and will mean that early intervention relationship counselling can take place while it can still have a positive effect.”
““Children’s Centres are exactly the kind of community hub that should be used to provide this support.”
Centre for Separated Families
The Centre for Separated Families supplied four quotes supporting the proposed child maintenance reforms - more than any other organisation. Karen and Nick Woodall of the Centre for Separated Families were protégés of Iain Duncan Smith’s think tank, the Centre for Social Justice, and of his Special Adviser, Samantha Callan. Tim Loughton rewarded the Woodalls for their support with a grant of £420,000. In the end, they were paid £444,000, even though HM Revenue & Customs took them to the Insolvency Court in August 2011. In 2012 Iain Duncan Smith awarded them contracts to design a new Sorting Out Separation website and train helpline advisers to support separated parents to make “family based arrangements” for child maintenance instead of using the CSA. They diverted the payments into other companies with similar names and abandoned the Centre for Separated Families in summer 2013 after they fell out with DWP officials alarmed at their views on domestic violence. The Centre for Separated Families disappeared from the Charity Commission website in December 2013 and was officially liquidated in December 2016, owing £178,000 to HMRC. In February 2019, both the Sorting Out Separation and Child Maintenance Options websites continue to signpost separated parents to the Centre for Separated Families.
Care for the Family
Care for the Family supplied three favourable quotes. Samantha Callan has worked with this fundamentalist evangelical Christian charity since at least 2001. She represented Care for the Family, and its sister charity, CARE (Christian Action, Research and Education) at international conferences of the extreme Religious Right in 2004 and 2005. The charity thought so highly of her that it even funded her PhD, which she completed in 2005. She is currently listed as a director of Care for the Family with Companies House. Given that Samantha Callan appears to have been supervising the entire process of child maintenance reform, it is extraordinarily cheeky to have supplied quotes from herself, purporting to be independent, endorsing her own proposals.
On 25 February 2011 Education Minister Tim Loughton awarded Care for the Family £500,000 to deliver Harry Benson’s “Let’s Stick Together” relationship support programme to teach exhausted new mothers to be nicer to their husbands. In the end, just £459,000 was paid because of poor take up of the programme.
Harry Benson was Samantha Callan’s Deputy Chair on the Family Breakdown Working Group that produced the “Fractured Families” report commissioned from the Centre for Social Justice by David Cameron while the Conservative Party was in opposition.
The one hour “Let’s Stick Together” programme, consisting of a video presentation followed by a short group discussion, was delivered by unpaid volunteers at a cost of over £2,000 per course participant. Despite having earned no salary for the preceding fourteen years, in December 2011 Harry Benson found himself miraculously able to buy a farm in Devon for his large family. He now preaches to his church congregation that God gave it to him in thanks for his work promoting marriage. A subsequent evaluation found that “Let’s Stick Together” had made no appreciable difference.
Action for Children
Action for Children was quoted twice in the Government’s response to the consultation on the proposed child maintenance reforms. Tim Loughton awarded the charity £1,405,000 in the Voluntary and Community Sector grant for 2011-2013.
On 1 September 2012 John O’Brien was appointed Chair of Action for Children, a Methodist charity previously known as National Children’s Homes.
John O’Brien has been a director of Care for the Family since 1997, and Chair of Trustees of CARE since 1993. It is unclear why the Chair of a notoriously homophobic fundamentalist Christian organisation such as CARE should be appointed Chair of a children’s charity. A percentage of children and their parents or carers will inevitably be LGBT. Perhaps equal opportunities are an unaffordable luxury when a new Chair has direct access to the grant makers. The Department for Education paid Action for Children a further £1,300,000 for 2013-2015.
When 4Children (see below) collapsed in September 2016, most of its services were taken over by Action for Children.
Families Need Fathers and JUMP
Families Need Fathers was awarded £525,000 in the Department for Education grant for the Voluntary and Community Sector on 25 February 2011.
Families Need Fathers, together with JUMP, was then quoted three times in the Government’s response to the consultation on 12 July 2011.
Families Need Fathers is a fathers’ rights organisation hostile to the Child Support Agency. Senior member Vincent McGovern is a huge fan of Karen Woodall and a frequent commentator on her blog, where they fulminate together about the feminist conspiracy to eradicate fathers via false domestic violence allegations.
JUMP stands for Jewish Unity for Multiple Parenting. JUMP has a long history of working with the Centre for Separated Families and CARE. On 8 May 2009 the Centre for Separated Families hosted their first international conference of the “Putting Children First European Forum” in Prague, and JUMP was one of eight organisations to attend. JUMP’s website states:
“JUMP has also built positive links with all the key UK national parent and grandparent organisations as well as other Non-Government Organisations supporting parental and child relationships including, Relate, CARE and The Centre for Social Justice.”
Having got away with a sham consultation on child maintenance reform, Iain Duncan Smith and Samantha Callan repeated the same tactics with their sham consultation on Measuring Child Poverty presented to Parliament in November 2012. On 15 September 2015 Samantha Callan gave evidence to the Public Bill Committee, insisting that the Government must remove income as a measure of child poverty, because “family breakdown drives poverty”. Professor David Gordon of Bristol University warned that Britain risked becoming “an international laughing stock” and that:
“Income is crucial. The last consultation on measuring child poverty received 104 responses, 103 of which wanted to keep all or at least one of the low income measures, because it is a root cause of poverty.”
Of course, the Government went ahead and removed income as a measure of child poverty, showing that it had absolutely no interest in heeding expert opinion, and that the consultation was entirely for show, with no prospect of influencing the Government’s plans.
The Department for Work and Pensions appears to be aware that the consultation was a sham. Over the past two years I have submitted numerous Freedom of Information requests on a variety of topics connected with child maintenance. Most are answered right at the end of the twenty working days time limit, while a few are answered outside the time limit. But almost all are answered. Occasionally, DWP writes back to me, refusing to answer and giving grounds for their refusal, such as the information already being available, or the cost of retrieving the information exceeding the threshold, or the request not being covered by the Freedom of Information Act.
However, my repeated Freedom of Information requests about the Green Paper have all been completely ignored. I made my first request on 31 August 2018, followed by a reminder on 2 October 2018, and a further urgent reminder on 14 January 2019. I have received no response whatsoever.
