Sell your children; it's the New Labour way

Is it just me, or does the government's latest plan for "reforming" the Child Support Agency (CSA) sound suspiciously like the first step towards privatisation of child benefits? Private debt collectors (almost certainly large corporations) are going to be used to collect money from absent parents who fail to pay child support. The important bit is that these companies will be able to keep a "proportion" of the debts which apparently total around £3 billion. Something tells me they'll do very nicely out of the deal, thank you very much, regardless of how much or little of that debt they manage to recover.

Following only a few weeks after work and pensions secretary John Hutton floated the idea that non-compliant absent parents might be tagged it's beginning to look rather like government policy in this area is being made on the run. That said, both ideas are consistent with the recurring themes of Blairite governance: authoritarianism and corporate involvement; the shitty stick and the GM carrot.