All those issues were identified during the passage of the Bill. They were all subject to amendments moved by the Opposition Benches. They were all rebuffed by the Government and in all cases the Government were wrong. In so far as they have not adopted them, they remain wrong. How much hardship and pain would have been avoided, how much administrative chaos would have been made unnecessary if the Government had only listened to us and taken the Bill forward in a non-provocative way.
Departures are very much a case in point.
We argued in this House and the other place time and again that the assessment system must include, as the Minister said today, some element of discretion, some element of flexibility, if the formula is to be fair as well as universal. Time and again, the Minister, the noble Lord, Lord Mackay, refused. It was as though by repeating the word he somehow made it true. Then, early last summer, we had the Child Support Bill, which embodied some of our concerns, and some of the affirmative regulations today flow from it. As the Minister said, it was based on a pilot scheme of 25,000 cases.