THE time has come to end the misery of the Child Support Agency and to "wind up the whole sorry saga," according to a Kent MP.

Roger Gale, MP for North Thanet, said: "In the past ten years I have handled more than 300 cases of complaint and confusion relating to the CSA, and many of those cases remain unresolved.

"Every single case represents a personal tragedy and frustration and real anger. Parents who have reached an amicable accommodation with each other have found themselves placed at odds by bureaucracy.

"Absent parents have faced unreasonable claims from former partners seeking revenge or making wholly unrealistic claims.

"Parents have been denied proper support for children while absent parents disguise real income. Delays within the system have led to parents avoiding payment and, in one classic case, actually leaving the country to get away from the responsibility of paying for children.

"This has been legislation born of good and proper intentions and introduced with the support of all political parties with disastrous and damaging consequences."

He added: "Case papers have been lost, computer programmes have failed and honest and hard-working civil servants have been deluged with a torrent of unmanageble casework, phone calls and abuse.

"This has been a catalogue of waste and mismanagement and the time has come to bring the present system to an end and to replace it with something that is simple, fair and workable."