Delivering effective child maintenance
Mary Quinn leads the Child Maintenance and Enforcement Division within the Department for Social Development. She discusses the complex issues within its remit with Owen McQuade and how the organisation has turned the corner after a difficult period.
Child maintenance has had more than its fair share of bad news headlines in the press but Mary Quinn is keen to tell the untold good news of how civil servants are supporting children and improving the quality of an important service. The Child Maintenance and Enforcement Division, which she leads, was created within the Department for Social Development in April 2008, when it replaced the Child Support Agency.
That previous agency had a welldocumented, troubled history over its 16-year existence and while Quinn accepts that a lot of criticism for poor service was fair, many of the problems facing staff were not always reported in a balanced way.
“Knowing the business as I now do and knowing the organisation as I do, I think that the staff, in delivering the business over those 16 years, did a pretty remarkable job, given the backdrop of complexity and challenge that they were facing.”
Introduced in 1993, child support was designed to replace the collection of maintenance through the courts, which often resulted in uneven outcomes: “There was no standard approach and it was very much a hit and miss affair whether children got maintenance or not. As a result very little was ultimately collected.”
The new child support scheme, while good in concept, involved complex calculations to assess the appropriate amount of maintenance to be paid. The rules tried to be fair to everyone involved, which in turn complicated an already complex formula. In the early days, staff had to gather and process up to 100 pieces of information to make a decision – a “constant challenge” as the income of the resident and non-resident parents, any partners, their housing and travel to work costs all had to be checked.
Handling such a volume of constantly changing information clearly presented great scope for inaccuracy, part of the legacy which still challenges the organisation today. Another added ingredient is the very sensitive nature of the work staff do.
“My staff deal with parents at a time when many are emotionally raw. Separation is never an easy time for families, and staff deal with parents at a time when they are at their most vulnerable. This, added to the complexity of the scheme, demonstrates the very challenging environment in which our staff find themselves daily.”
“Unlike many other businesses, every case we have has two customers. The parent with care and the non-resident parent. In Northern Ireland, we have 40,000 live cases so that’s 80,000 customers, many of whom are constantly giving us information, updating information, raising queries and challenging the decisions we make. This makes the work of the division very information intensive with security being an important and key consideration,” Quinn remarks.
In March 2003, new child support rules were introduced, along with a new computer system to simplify the process and make the whole scheme more open and easier to understand. However, due to well publicised problems with the computer system, the reforms were not as successful as anticipated and many problems accumulated in the business.
“It had quite an impact on our staff. It had a very big impact on the public. There were all sorts of recriminations in the press. Despite the constraints of the computer system staff still had to deliver a service and work through a very difficult period. At the point when we launched our Operational Improvement Project in early 2006, we did so with a battle weary workforce.”
Operational improvement
Delivery of the project meant a radical change to the way work was done in the organisation. New tools, processes and organisational changes were put in place by the division to significantly improve services to its clients. Now at the end of the three year project, it is pleasing to report that significant improvements have been made. By the end of March 2009, the division had recorded its best financial performance – almost £23 million secured for children in Northern Ireland compared to around £18 million in 2006-2007. At the end of May 2009, the division was supporting just over 21,000 children and its number of new applications awaiting processing has fallen from 9,000 in 2004 to 2,000 today. Accuracy of current assessments sits at 96 per cent whilst the speed in which telephone calls are answered is running at an average of seven seconds, right up there with top performing organisations.
Quinn emphasises that the record sum collected in 2008-2009 was against the backdrop of the economic downturn, when an increasing number of nonresident parents found themselves out of work or on short-time working, with ultimately less income.
As a result of the Operational Improvement Project, the division has grown stronger and Quinn describes its structure as “pretty much now where it needs to be and ready to handle future changes and challenges”. Her admiration for the division’s staff comes across throughout the discussion.
Enforcement
Division staff have access to a range of new tools, including use of external trace experts, to track down parents many of whom “go to extraordinary lengths to evade or avoid taking financial responsibility for their children. Regrettably there are still too many parents who fall into this category. It is here that we have to change hearts and minds.”
Staff have direct access to the credit information of non-resident parents which is extremely valuable in negotiating arrears settlements. “We know the credit that is available to such parents and we make this clear in our discussions with them. Those parents are left in no doubt that we will pursue them for the money they owe.” In making child support maintenance payments parents can now use credit and debit cards, a method that is increasing in popularity.
For those persistent non-payers the division has the facility to refer ‘debt’ cases to an external debt collection agency, a facility that has contributed to the division’s success in collecting arrears. This has been accompanied by more active enforcement through the courts. As a result, parents may find themselves facing a court hearing with the potential for a criminal record and a jail sentence.
“However, we hope we don’t get to that point,” she states. “We have the facility through the courts to commit to prison and actually we had a case recently where the non-resident parent was told: ‘Come back here next Friday and if you haven’t paid in between, be sure you’re going down.’
“For me, if that parent goes to prison, that’s not the best outcome. It’s a good deterrent to others but in my view the most valued result is where we get money to the children. Our interest is not in ‘flogging’ anyone, rather it is in getting money for children and we will take whatever action is required to make sure that happens.”
However most of the division’s enforcement success goes unpublicised to protect the privacy of families. One recent success for the division was when a non-resident parent was taken to court to force the sale of property so that child maintenance arrears could be paid. Just ahead of the case, the defendant’s solicitor persuaded the defendant to pay up as he realised the likely outcome of the court case. This resulted in a £43,500 cheque going to the parent who had care of the child, which made an “enormous difference” to the life of that child.
“That parent is absolutely delighted with the result, because she herself was facing debt as a result of not having the financial support that she needed. Just one example of the important work carried out by the division.”
The enforcement focus also included a media campaign ‘Are You Robbing Your Child?’ which was launched in September last year and included amongst other things television and radio adverts and bill board posters. That campaign was successful in getting important messages over to parents and society in general and played an important part in bringing in more money for more children. The division intends to do more of this type of advertising in the future in its bid to change societal attitudes and encourage greater parental responsibility.
Debt
The headline debt figure of £82 million, often reported in the media, represents the total amount of child maintenance owed by parents to their children in Northern Ireland, a sum which she considers to be a “very poor indictment” on our society. This is a cumulative total over 16 years as, currently, the division has no authority to write off child support debt in any circumstances, not even if the debtor has died.
“Any level of child support debt is unacceptable as this represents money that is owed by parents for their children”. While it is not yet possible, for a variety of reasons, to significantly reduce that headline amount of debt the division remains focused on recovering outstanding child support arrears and is pleased to report significant increases in the amount of arrears collected annually.
“Over the next couple of years, I am hopeful that we will get to a point, where we can actually start reducing that debt.” she adds.
“It’s going to take time. It’s going to take a lot of effort and work to get there but I’m confident that we’re on the right journey. I’m clear that the work we’re doing now is taking us in the right direction and our results are showing that.”
People
Quinn has been Head of Division for two and a half years. She sees her staff as the foundation of the organisation, “the people who deliver and make a difference for the children we serve” and whilst the average age of the staff is relatively young at 30, a number have been working in the division since it began in the early nineties. She says: “Keeping our people on board through challenging times and bringing them along with us is a major challenge for the organisation.
“I pay great tribute to the people who work in the division. I’m very fortunate in that I have a very strong, focussed and dedicated senior team working with me.”
Around 1,500 people work in the division, of which just over 1,000 provide child maintenance services to the Eastern area of Great Britain.
“The organisation was successful in securing these jobs, because we, in Northern Ireland, have the ability to recruit and retain good quality, well qualified staff and we have retained that work over the years through delivery of an effective and efficient service. We work very closely with colleagues in the Child Maintenance and Enforcement Commission in Great Britain to maintain this arrangement. Obviously the better we are, the greater the prospects of continuing the arrangement”.
She adds: “We want to keep our well trained workforce here. Obviously, we will always face a level of attrition and it is good to have the opportunity to bring new blood into the workforce. Like many other organisations, we face challenges all the time in terms of the world moving on – keeping pace with technology, societal changes, managing risks and handling the many initiatives that are under way.”
The child support legislation and the personal circumstances of the clients make for a very complex kind of work in a fast-moving environment. As Head of Division, Mary places a high importance on recognising staff achievements e.g. through employee of the month and team of the month awards, and publishing good news on the staff intranet.
“We have many, many excellent staff and they rise to the challenge and make every effort to get the best outcomes for children.”
Future
The division’s Minister, Margaret Ritchie, is fully committed to the work of the division and to ensuring that all non resident parents meet their financial responsibilities” .
Quinn adds that the Minister has been “very supportive” and took the Child Maintenance Act through the Assembly last year. This changed the division’s role from an “assessment, collection and paying-out service” to a more multifaceted one with responsibility for three distinct strands of business:
- Promoting awareness of child maintenance;
- Providing impartial information and support; and
- Providing a statutory maintenance and enforcement service.
“There’s a lot of myth and legend out there about the division and that myth and legend needs to be dispelled. What we’re saying to society is: ‘Please get behind us here and help us to make non-payment of child maintenance as socially unacceptable as drink driving.’ When society embraces this philosophy there will be no hiding place and no support for non-payers.”
This leads Quinn on to her ideal for child support, in which the division would wind up because the problem was effectively solved by society at large.
“I think ultimately, when we get to a point in Northern Ireland where the Child Maintenance and Enforcement Division is no longer needed, that’s when we’ll have been very successful. We’ll have promoted awareness, we’ll have a society which understands and meets its responsibilities and we’ll have a society that looks after its own children. That’s almost Utopia, and that’s the direction we’ve got to travel in.”
Mary Quinn also envisages that promotion and awareness is likely to involve educating our school children on what is involved in parental responsibility. The key message for young people is: “You may not be in a position to maintain your child financially now but when you start work, that responsibility has to be picked up and will remain with you for many years.”
As an organisation that used to focus solely on providing a statutory maintenance service, this educational work is “very new to us” but it is important to inform society about the division and what it does. In doing this, she hopes to influence and change public attitudes towards the division’s work.
“Park the past, look at what we’re doing now. Look at our results over the past few years. Look at our purpose. Look at what we’re trying to do. Our mission now is to promote and secure effective child maintenance arrangements for the children in Northern Ireland whose parents live apart.”
In summing up, she again highlights her high regard for the staff and their work. While good news does not sell papers or magazines, Quinn is convinced that it is happening in the division’s work and its story must therefore be told.
Profile: Mary Quinn
Mary Quinn joined the Child Support Agency in 2000 as Business Development Director. In 2006, she became Operations Director with overall responsibility for the delivery of child maintenance services to Northern Ireland and Eastern England. In February 2007, through open competition, she was appointed Chief Executive of the Child Support Agency and was appointed Head of Child Maintenance and Enforcement Division when the agency wound up in March 2008./p>
Mary won the prestigious United Kingdom Leader of the Year Award at last year’s Women in Public Life awards. Her interests are family-orientated and include walking, travel and “playing golf badly”.
