MECHANICS OF PAYMENT OF ALIMENT BILL (Hansard, 12 December 1972)

§ Mr. Tam Dalyell (West Lothian)

I beg briefly to move, That leave be given to bring in a Bill to transfer responsibility for the mechanics of collection and payment of alimony or aliment awarded to women, by court order, from the individual to the Department of Health and Social Security and the Inland Revenue. In order to save the time of the House, and for another reason, I shall not go into the details of the problem. Week after week hon. Members at their surgeries are asked by women, "Can you help us, because we have been awarded alimony through the courts but are not getting it". That situation is only too familiar to every hon. Member, and I propose to leave it at that.

The question is, what can be done about it? I felt that in the time at my disposal I should take the four strongest arguments—two from the Home Office and two from the Inland Revenue—as to why it should not be done. Let me consider the Home Office first.

Let us give credit quite fairly. The Minister of State knows that with his attachment of earnings order and his maintenance order he has made the position a little better, but I submit that it is still very difficult because there are many women who do not want to go through the courts. When it is put to them, "But your redress is in the courts", they reply, "No thank you. We do not want to go through the agony of all that".

It is crucial to the Bill which I hope to introduce that the House should understand, as I am sure hon. Members do, the psychological state of these women. They simply do not want to go through the courts. I am sure that hon. Members understand the sheer feeling of humiliation suffered by these women. All I say to the Home Office is that before turning down the Bill, for heaven's sake understand this feeling of humiliation among those who come to us with this problem.

The second reason that is given by the Home Office is that we must "wait for Finer", but the Finer Committee was appointed on 6th November 1969. For three years and one month we have been told to wait for Finer, and I think this raises for the House the question whether 244 an urgent problem should be shoved off on to a Royal Commission.

I do not want to criticise Morris Finer too much but one wonders whether, when urgent problems are given to them to consider, busy and distinguished lawyers should get involved in investigations into the Trident and so on. What I am saying is that in a situation where the divorce rate in England and Wales has gone up from 26,360 in 1961, through 1966 to 40,213, to 57,066 in 1971, and in Scotland from 1,804 to 4,785 in the corresponding period, the problem which the Bill is trying to tackle is urgent and will not wait for a couple of years after Finer reports.

Now I come to the Treasury. I had an informative interview with the Minister of State, and I understand that if something could easily have been done about this it would have been done. The first objection from the Inland Revenue is, "We must not be used for non-tax purposes". A leading article in The Times of 22nd February 1971, after I first attempted to introduce this Bill, said: 'The tax collector should stick to his forms' was the Treasury argument". and went on to say: This canon of administrative practice needs to be measured against the injustices suffered by these women and the grave situation created by the rapidly increasing number of divorces". It then argued that where there was a will there was a way.

The second main argument is one of confidentiality. After all that has been said in this House about the confidentiality of Government records it would be foolish of me lightly to dismiss the argument. All I say is that there is a balance here, and in my view and in the view of a number of friends of the Inland Revenue, tracing through the national insurance number scheme, noted at the time of the court order, could be carried out by the Inland Revenue. This is critical. Psychologically, a demand that goes to men from the Inland Revenue has much more force than a letter from a deserted woman and her lawyer in some town which may seem far away because, psychologically, most British people—and this is crucial to the Bill—do not disregard the Inland Revenue.

245 Another Treasury argument is that if my proposal were to go forward the State would, in a sense, be underwriting money that ought to be paid by men who have deserted their wives and left their families. I am sure that it would be possible to work out some kind of compromise so that where a proportion of payment could not be recovered it would be paid by the State.

That kind of complication is precisely the reason why the subject should be debated in Committee upstairs. Having been lucky enough to be the first to be given leave to introduce a Ten-Minute Rule Bill, I am not merely asking for the leave of the House to bring it in. That is not sufficient in itself, because this is not a propaganda exercise. This is an attempt—and if the Ten-Minute Rule procedure is to be meaningful at all this can be done by Bills that are presented before Christmas—to do something about the problem and not merely to conduct some kind of a show or propaganda exercise.

In these circumstances, aware of the difficulties, what I am asking for is not only leave of the House, but that the Leader of the House should provide for this sort of complication to be aired in Committee. It is on that basis that I ask leave to present this Bill today.