Newsgroup debate (1998) on the future of the CSA

This set of articles describes a set of debates held on the newsgroup before the Green Paper was published.

(The debate took place well before Google took over the news archive from Deja.com. The links here may not all work properly since the take-over. If so, it should be possible to find them by doing a search using the word-in-title "DEBATE", author "Ward", for the dates from start of March 1998 to end of May 1998).

The Debate

On 23rd March 1998 (months before the CSA Reform Green Paper was issued), several questions about the reform of the CSA were posed in Parliament.

I posted these to the news:uk.gov.agency.csa newsgroup to see if people with an active interest in the questions could come to a useful consensus. In each case I provided a "starter for ten" to get the discussion going.

This started about 5 threads in the newsgroup. These can still be viewed via Google Groups. I used the name "John Ward" throughout these threads.

At the end of the DEBATE, I attempted to summarise and draw conclusions from the DEBATE. I posted some observations and conclusions back to the newsgroup, and also made these available as Word for Windows (RTF) files for anyone to use. This article is how these 5 threads started. Other articles (see navigational header to this article) supply the observations and conclusions.

Introductory post

A chance to debate the future John Ward - 03/26/1998:

"In the Commons on 23rd March, Harriet Harman and others posed several questions which need to be answered during the process of reforming child support. (See my earlier posting "Commons discussion on CSA - 23rd March").

"This NG is good at discussing detailed issues of CSA law and practice, and (be honest) good at complaining. Can it be as good at analysing the issues and identifying possible solutions?

"Below, I've identified 5 key issues/questions which emerged during the Commons discussion. Each probably justifies a thread to explore the feeling of the NG and see if a consensus is possible. (Or the NG can wait until someone else makes the decisions, then complain about them)."

Supplementary posts

Think PRINCIPLES not DETAILS (Re: A chance to debate the future) John Ward - 03/28/1998

The END of the DEBATE John Ward - 04/29/1998