Liam Byrne MP, Labour’s Shadow Work and Pensions Secretary, responding to the Government’s defeat over plans to charge single parents for using the Child Support Agency, said:

The Coalition's flagship welfare reform Bill suffered another defeat in the House of Lords as senior Tory peers opposed plans to change child maintenance rules.

The government's welfare bill suffers another defeat in the House of Lords, this time over plans to charge single parents to use the Child Support Agency.

Child maintenance is a life-line for many single parent families, whose children are twice as likely to live in poverty as those of couple families. The Government’s proposals to attach charges to access the Child Support Agency will see vulnerable families with no option but to seek state help to gain maintenance pushed further into

Despite escaping one major ambush, Lord Freud cannot have been looking forward to Amendment 59, moved by the Bishop of Ripon and Leeds. A short amendment; Clause 94, page 63, line 25, after “benefits” insert “with the exclusion of child benefit” it addressed issues of child poverty, as the Bishop noted, The Government’s assessment of

Rarely can a government have been so pleased to have been defeated. The Tories are, privately, delighted that the Lords have voted to water down the benefit cap, removing child benefit from it. The longer this attempt to cap benefit for non-working households at £26,000 stays in the news, the better it is for the government. It demonstrates to the electorate that they are trying to do somethi...

The House of Lords backed the Bishop of Ripon and Leeds's amendment to exclude child benefit from the £26,000-a-year cap on benefits per household.

Nearly 700,000 middle class families are to be stripped of child benefit in just over a year's time, according to new estimates.

Baroness Flather said it was "not right and not fair" for benefits to pay for people to live in "central London first-rate accommodation" which they could not afford if they were in work.

Middle income earners could be shielded from Coalition cuts to child benefit but the payments will still be stopped for those with the highest salaries, ministers indicated yesterday.