Synopses & Reviews
The Child Support Agency (CSA), created in was, and remains, one of the most controversial creations of government in Britain in recent years. It exists to provide a means to ensure that adequate financial provision is made for the children of a relationship following the breakup of that relationship.
This book presents the results of the first and only major study of the agency by three of the most respected researchers in the sociolegal field. The result is possibly the most comprehensive examination of a new piece of British government policy ever attempted or allowed. The findings presented in this book will affect the future of the CSA as well as any future legislation in family law.
Synopsis
This book presents a wholly new perspective on the Child Support Agency. The authors were granted privileged access to the CSA's own staff and were thus able to monitor case conduct from both the Agency and the client perspective. In a gripping analysis they compare the accounts of former husbands and wives with those of their respective legal advisers, and, critically, they incorporate the experience and views of the beleaguered CSA staff who attempted to calculate and enforce child maintenance obligations in those same cases. The media picture of the misery visited upon 'absent fathers' is borne out in part, but even more striking is the authors' account of a catastrophic administrative failure which led to the abandonment of many of the basic tenets of administrative justice. The reasons do not lie in the perceived unfairness of the formula but rather in the failure of those drafting the Child Support legislation to appreciate the impact of such change upon the rest of our hugely complex benefit structure. Their failure to grasp that the problems of inadequate disclosure and ineffective enforcement - with which courts had grappled for decades - could not be tackled effectively by a distant bureaucracy.
Synopsis
This study of the Child Support Agency (CSA) compares the accounts of former husbands and wives with those of their respective legal advisers, and incorporates the experience and views of the CSA staff, who attempted to calculate and enforce child maintenance obligations in the same cases. The media picture of misery visited upon absent fathers is borne out in part, but the book also describes a catastrophic administrative failure which led to the abandonment of many of the basic tenets of administrative justice. The reasons for this do not lie in the perceived unfairness of the formula, but rather in the failure of those drafting the Child Support legislation to appreciate the impact of such change upon the rest of our hugely complex benefit structure, and their failure to grasp that the problems of inadequate disclosure and ineffective enforcement could not be tackled effectively by a distant bureaucracy.