THERE IS AN iron rule for big stories involving percentages: always reverse them. Take — and not at all at random — yesterday’s discovery that one sixth of all men who had applied to the Child Support Agency for DNA testing on their presumed progeny discovered that indeed they were not the daddy. That’s 3,000-plus chaps who were being diddled into maintenance by the mothers of the tennis coach’s child. Things being what they are, the CSA will pay taxpayer ’s money to compensate the non-fathers, and the agency probably doesn’t have a hope in hell of getting it back from the women or the tennis coaches involved. Anticipated moral? Bloody CSA.
Now reverse the figure. Five-sixths of all the men who felt strongly enough about the possible paternity of their children that they went for tests found out that their suspicions were unfounded. That is 84 per cent. It’s a completely different story, but that won’t make the slightest difference. We have already decided that we have had enough of the Child Support Agency, and that something radical will have to happen in the new year. Along with commissioning nuclear power stations, resolving the pensions crisis, reforming local government financing and ending war and poverty.
The popular image of the CSA matches that of the Court of Chancery in Bleak House, now being screened on BBC One. Stuff goes in — money, time, hopes — and only despair comes out. Since 1993 chief executives have arrived, and departed wreathed in a cloud of ignominious failure. Computer systems have failed, reports have emerged of CSA staff deleting awkward files, entering false information on the database and avoiding difficult phone calls by transferring them to the voicemail systems of absent colleagues. Performance targets have been missed, the backlog of cases has grown again, there have been compensation payments made to 35,000 people because of maladministration, and — therefore — families who are entitled to support have had to go without it.
There has been a 12-year arse-kicking competition as a result. Whoever the Government is has struck out at the management of the CSA, and whoever the Opposition is has struck out at the Government. “There has got to be a change,” said Tony Blair recently, without wanting to elaborate further. “It has been a complete shambles and I am absolutely determined that we are going to do something about it,” said David Blunkett, shortly before his most recent departure.
“It’s time for clarity,” said Paul Goodman, the Tory spokesman, without offering any, save the view that the Government should cut bureaucracy and increase the collection of money. And end war and poverty. The Liberal Democrats, who have played an important role in uncovering just how useless the CSA is, more constructively recommend abolishing the CSA and integrating it into the Inland Revenue.
Perhaps this is a good idea, but there is one question which should be answered first. Is it just possible that the job that the CSA was set up to do — to get significant amounts of money from estranged partners — is pretty much undoable? It should be recalled, by the way, that although the push for the CSA came from Peter Lilley in a slightly unenlightened, back-to-basics era of Tory rule, it was politically the product of voter power. It was a postbag biggie for Conservative MPs. The electorate was outraged by having to shell out for the abandoned offspring of deadbeat dads and wanted someone to get them to pay up. The CSA was what we got.
It is tempting to see the problem as one of bad management and a few design faults. It is tempting partly because such an analysis suggests a comforting solution: put in the right management, iron out the faults, and you’re off. But supposing it’s the job that is making a hash of the organisation, and not the other way around? The tendency in this field is to divide the world into villainous and virtuous spouses. For Fathers 4 Justice the land is full of vengeful women who destroy their children’s lives by refusing them contact with their dads. For other campaigners the principal enemy is made up of feckless, grasping fathers, who cannot be persuaded by argument to support their own kids, and who therefore must be compelled to do so.
A newcomer to the latter cause is an organisation calling itself Babies for Justice. The name itself tells you about the psychology involved. Babies, of course, don’t ask for justice, people (mothers, in this instance) ask for it supposedly on their behalf. It is a waving of tiny fists. And the stories on the new organisation’s website tell you just what treacherous territory this is. Some of them are poignant, some of them are absurd, and they are very, very different. There ’s a serial marrier of unsuitable men; an heiress who could get the money from her dad but instead demands it from her ex; a playboy racing driver; there’s a lawyer’s wife who finds that he knows all the moves; a woman who has left her husband, remarried happily, but who still wants him to pay up for the kids. And on and on.
Take — and analyse — just this short excerpt from one woman, who describes how “my constant battles to get justice from my ex-husband and bringing up three children has consumed my life . . . This man tried every trick in the book to destroy me and I have been fighting him to the death to stay afloat . . . he has had another baby with a new wife (for which he paid £16,000 for vasectomy reversals) and now the CSA (taking into account this new baby) have waived the paltry £5.60 he was supposed to pay for our three children.”
An agency can’t deal with this. When couples split up there is greed, cruelty, anger, jealousy and — very often — a complete inability to see the partner’s point of view. And even that formulation may be too simple. Families are becoming increasingly complex. We have gay families, stepfamilies and multiple stepfamilies, and no one in the public arena (as my analyst friend points out) has theorised this area: we don’t know and haven’t studied why it is that people do what they do. No wonder, then, that we can’t work out how to get them to do something else.
Nor is this, as some seem to suggest, a simple matter of applying coercion, because what we can already see is how extraordinarily self-destructive people are prepared to be if they think that they have been badly treated by their partner. Not long ago the Government set up pilot schemes to encourage mediation before child contact cases came to court. The obvious hope was to prevent the entrenchment of grievance that recourse to law often creates. Apparently these pilots are failing — people are refusing mediation. Like the ward of Chancery, Richard Carstone, we want and expect to win.
In this situation, to ask the State to solve these problems is to ask it to bring order into our most private chaos, to intervene in a million mini-Balkans. It can try, but it will never look good.
david.aaronovitch@thetimes.co.uk
