The Child Support Benefit

Ten Frequently Asked Questions

Earlier this year the Cabinet accepted a recommendation by the Minister for Welfare and Population Development to introduce a new cash grant for children, the Child Support Benefit, and to phase out the existing State Maintenance Grant (SMG) for women and children. The Child Support Benefit (CSB) will go to about ten times more children than the state maintenance grant reaches. The CSB will form part of the state social security system.

The main principles on which the Child Support Benefit is based:

• The government cannot cover all the costs of rearing very poor children, but is able to assist by giving a small cash grant to supplement the income of poor families.
• The level of assistance will be linked to an objective measure of need.
• The operation of the Benefit will acknowledge fiscal constraints.
• The focus of the Benefit is on children.
• The Benefit is one of several government programmes aimed at poverty relief and eradication.
  

In all sectors - health and education for example - difficult decisions are being made about how to spread resources to service more people. There has been much debate about the CSB plan. A lot of the debate has been between people who share the same commitment to the protection of children and the fight against poverty. Several aspects of the CSB have not yet been finalised, including the means test. The following responses are presented in an effort to answer some of the frequently asked questions about the CSB.

No. The Child Support Benefit is a completely separate system from private maintenance, which parents apply for through magistrate’s courts, and which falls under the Department of Justice. To get a State Maintenance Grant, a mother (and sometimes a father) has to first try to get financial support from the other parent through the magistrate’s court - called the private maintenance system. This system has worked badly, with the mother having to spend a lot of time and money trying to find the father, or trying to find out if he has a job. It is very difficult and sometimes dangerous for women to get access to the father’s finances. It is also very difficult, even when a maintenance order is granted, to actually get the other parent to pay.

The system works so badly that many people are encouraged to misuse the system. For example, they pretend that they don’t know where the father is, so they can take a shortcut and apply for the State Maintenance Grant. Also, many South African men cannot pay maintenance for their children because they are unemployed or earn very low wages.

The private maintenance system is important as a way to put pressure on parents to take up their financial responsibilities. The Department of Justice has accepted that there are serious shortcomings with the system, and has undertaken to reform it.

The Child Support Benefit will be paid to the primary care giver of a child - that is, whoever is actually taking care of a child, whether the parent, or an aunt, or a grandparent. The care giver will be asked about where the parent or parents are, and will be informed about the private maintenance system. But there will not have to be proof that an attempt has been made to trace the father, or the mother, through the courts.

When new systems like the Child Support Benefit are started, it takes some time for them to get going. Usually a slow take-up period is followed by more rapid growth as applications increase.

This will happen especially as administrative systems in some of the poorest areas, like the former Bantustans, rural areas and former self-governing states are still weak. It takes time for all people to know their rights under new systems, and to claim them.

The rate of take-up depends on knowledge of the scheme among potential beneficiaries, the ease of access to places where applications are taken; and the ‘absorption capacity’ of the administration - how many applications they are able to process, at what speed.

If the existing maintenance system is phased out sooner than the new Child Support Benefit is introduced, there will be savings to the government.

However the intention is not to cut back on welfare in order to save - the intention is to extend the assistance that government is able to offer to poor families to many more children. In any case, money form the phasing out of the state maintenance grant will be saved only once - a ‘once-off saving’. The new system, introduced more slowly, will be here to stay - it will be a continuing cost.

Therefore in the middle to longer term, the government will be spending more money on social security for children than before.

In the past, welfare services were provided in racially separate administrations. Policies were driven by racial ideology, which gave rise to the present patterns of poverty and inequality. Information was not collected according to who needed what services, or where gaps in services were. These things contributed to a poor base of information on which to build new policies.

One way of building policies when you are not sure of the data is to use conservative or pessimistic assumptions about, for example, how many people you are planning for, or how much money there is to be shared. As new and more accurate information comes in, it makes the application of the policy easier, or it means there is more of a service or a resource to go around than in the initial design of the policy.

To work out the Child Support Benefit, you have to know how many South African children there are. How many children are there of a particular age group, for example, and how many of them are poor? The South African Census is one estimate of the population, but was not very reliable in the past because of under-counting, especially of the African population.

The Lund Committee used a higher estimate so that whatever the final figure is, decided by the 1996 Census, it will be easier to spread scarce resources. The new census estimates will be taken into account when modelling the benefit.

Because the people presently receiving the State Maintenance Grants will lose an important source of income, the decision was made to phase it out gradually, so that people can attempt to secure other sources of income and livelihood.

The Department of Welfare is using the Flagship Programme for Unemployed Women with Children under Five to explore ways of helping poor women to secure an independent living. The Department is seeking to secure funds for another programme which will specifically aim to help women presently receiving the State Maintenance Grant; and it will be encouraging other Departments, such as Trade and Industry, and Labour, to design their programmes to take into account the special needs of vulnerable women.

South Africa has a pattern of inequality such that a few people are very well-off, and the great majority are very poor. If limited resources allow you to reach only a certain amount of the poor, you need an instrument to help you identify those who are in greater need than others. This is normally done through a means test. It is going to be very difficult to find a way of choosing a limited number of children. A Task Team is doing research to find a way around this problem. The aim is to have a means test that would be simple to administer.

No. All children who are in the qualifying years 0 to 6 will be eligible for the Benefit.

No. The Lund Committee (which released its findings in September 1996) made suggestions for some alternatives to income and assets as a way of assessing levels of poverty, and nutritional status was put forward as one of a number of possibilities to combine with other measures of poverty. Malnourishment cannot be used on its own, as this would mean people would come too late to get assistance for their children. The Task Team will be looking at a number of options to identify and target the most vulnerable children.

How does one determine a level for a grant such as the Child Support Benefit? It is important to link the level of a benefit to some objective measure, so that the grant can be linked to changing prices and changes in the cost of living. The Household Subsistence Level is one such measure of the cost of living.

Researchers calculate it by going to shops in urban and rural areas and finding out how much basic goods cost. All such measures are always controversial, with very different views about what goods to measure. The HSL in South Africa has been criticised because it has been measured for different ‘race groups’; this has been called a racist measure. Because it only measures certain living costs, it has also been called inadequate.

However, the advantage of the HSL is that it is done twice a year; and it is immediately available. It can certainly be improved on, and research should be done about this. But whatever measure is decided on, it is most important to keep the principle alive: the level of the Benefit must be linked to some objective measure of need.

This is one of the areas where difficult trade-offs had to be considered. A plan such as this should not exclude the poorest people, who are more likely to live in areas where health services are least developed. On the other hand, the link to health is important, and it is positive to offer an incentive to use the health services better in the earliest years of a child’s life.

The district health systems, based on primary health care, are beginning to be put in place, and will make health services more accessible to all. Most South African children are now born with some contact with the health services, either at birth or for first weighing. For the system to work, caregivers would not have to take the child frequently to the health services. It will be important to monitor closely how many people will be disadvantaged, in what way, and pay special attention to overcoming this.

It is well known that in rural areas and in urban areas where poor people live, there are not enough banks and post offices and other services which people need. Yet it has been proposed that the Child Support Benefit should be paid four times a year (quarterly) into an account held by the primary care-giver.

The amount of the grant will be small, and it is not intended to cover the full costs of child care. There is a basic trade-off involved between the cost of administering a small payment every month as opposed to a larger payment every quarter.

Is it better to have a larger amount of money (the level of the grant times three months) paid safely into a fixed institution, which people can go to when it is convenient for them? They can then draw from it when they go to a small town to go to clinic, or to the post office, or to shop. Or is it better to make people travel long distances for a smaller amount of cash every single month? If more state money is channelled via the banks and post offices, it is possible these services will grow and become stronger, rather than be cut back. The Task Team will consider the alternatives carefully.

There is no doubt that the overall plan as recommended could be improved. But this will have to be in such a way that it is fiscally responsible, sustainable, and integrates with overall developmental social welfare. South Africa is one of the few countries in the world where a government is considering improving, or even keeping alive, cash based state child support in this way.

The Department has set up a Child Support Benefit Task Team to implement the proposals. The work will be managed under the following programmes:

• Legislation
• Delivery systems
• Finance
• Developmental Welfare
• Phasing out the State Maintenance Grant
• Communications.

The Task Team will work in close partnership with social security staff in the provinces, and takes seriously the need for simplicity and effectiveness of administration. It will focus on creating and operating cross-sectoral links. It will work within the overall policy of developmental social welfare, and the recent work done within the department on restructuring of social security.

For information contact the Department of Welfare: