Savings Accounts and Health in Pregnancy Grant Bill

Baroness Armstrong of Hill Top Excerpts

Tuesday 7th December 2010 Lords Chamber

[The Commercial Secretary to the Treasury (Lord Sassoon)]

My Lords, the Savings Accounts and Health in Pregnancy Grant Bill does three things: it ends eligibility for child trust funds for children born from January 2011 onwards; it repeals the Saving Gateway Accounts Act 2009, following the Government’s decision not to introduce the saving gateway scheme; and it abolishes the health in pregnancy grant, again from January 2011. I will come on to the detail of these measures, but let me begin by explaining their purpose, and the purpose of this Bill.

As noble Lords will be aware, Britain is facing an extraordinary fiscal challenge. Last year, we had the largest peacetime deficit in our history, and we were borrowing one pound in every four that we spent. That challenge required the Government to take quick and decisive action to respond, and we have done so. In May, we set out over £6 billion of savings that we would make in this financial year, including £320 million from the child trust fund. At the Budget we then set out a clear plan to tackle the deficit over the coming years, and at the spending review we set out how we would put that plan into action. As my right honourable friend the Chancellor of the Exchequer said in the Statement that I repeated in your Lordships’ House last Monday, that plan is working; it has taken Britain out of the financial danger zone. The forecasts made by the Office for Budget Responsibility last week show the economy growing in each of the next six years, and growing faster this year than had been expected in June. Employment is also forecast to grow in every year of this Parliament, with total employment expected to rise from 29 million to 30.1 million.

As my right honourable friend the Chancellor said last week, the decisive plan that the Government have set out is working and we will not abandon it.

[Baroness Armstrong of Hill Top]

My Lords, has the Minister seen the report from the Fawcett Society which identifies how discriminatory the Budget and the spending review have been against women and women with children? As this Bill is all about that issue, what is the Minister’s response to the Fawcett Society report?

[Lord Sassoon]

As I understand it, the Fawcett Society is currently involved in judicial review proceedings in relation to this matter. I am sure that we will come on later, as we should, to talk about the specific impact of the Bill. However, I am not sure that now is the right time to talk about the wider impacts. A Question has been tabled for answer next week about the wider impact of the Government’s measures. We should stick to the effect of the current measures, which I will come on to.

As I say, the Bill is an important part of the Government’s consolidation plan. Together, the ending of eligibility for child trust funds, the decision not to introduce the saving gateway and the abolition of the health in pregnancy grant will save £370 million this year and around £800 million in each year in future. While I realise that some noble Lords will find these changes disappointing, I believe that they are necessary and are the right savings to make. The child trust fund, for example, would have cost over half a billion pounds this year. That money would have been locked up for up to 18 years instead of supporting people now, and that is a luxury that we simply cannot afford.

As noble Lords will know, we therefore announced in May that government payments to child trust funds would be reduced and then stopped altogether. In July, we made regulations to reduce payments at birth and to stop payments at age seven altogether. Those regulations will also end the additional payments that are made to disabled children from 2011-12 onwards, although we will recycle the money that would have been spent on those payments to provide additional respite breaks.

Clause 1 now completes the process by ending eligibility for child trust funds for all children born from January 2011 onwards, meaning that the remaining government payments will stop altogether. However, we remain committed to encouraging saving for children within our limited resources. At Second Reading in another place, my right honourable friend the Financial Secretary announced that the Government will introduce a new tax-free account for saving for children, likely to be known as a junior ISA. We are now working closely with stakeholders to design these accounts but we have already set out that they will allow parents to invest in either cash or stocks and shares for their children, with the money locked up for the child until they reach adulthood. These accounts will offer parents a clear and simple way to save for their children, tax-free, but to do so while saving the half a billion pounds a year that continuing with child trust funds would have cost us.

That would have been unaffordable. We also believe that it would have been unaffordable to introduce the saving gateway, which is dealt with in Clause 2. That would have been a cash savings scheme for people on lower incomes, based on the idea of matching a government contribution for each pound saved. The scheme was due to be introduced in July 2010.

There was some evidence from the pilots for the saving gateway that matching was a popular and easily understood incentive to save, but the Bill Committee in the other place also heard from Carl Emmerson of the Institute for Fiscal Studies that,

“there was not any really strong evidence from the saving gateway that it led to more overall saving from lower-income households”.

When we looked at this ahead of the Budget, it was clear that the summer of 2010, just as we were starting to tackle the deficit, would have been exactly the wrong time to bring in a new scheme that would have cost £300 million over the next five years. We also had concerns that the previous Government had failed to sign up enough account providers to operate the scheme effectively. The RBS Group and Lloyds Banking Group had said they would offer the accounts, but none of the other big high street banks was planning to do so, nor was a single building society. The Post Office had agreed to offer the accounts only if it received a subsidy from the Government to cover its costs.

For these reasons, we announced at the Budget that the saving gateway would not be introduced. We therefore stopped the Saving Gateway Accounts Act 2009 coming into force, and this Bill repeals it altogether. As we have no plans to introduce the scheme, it is right to remove the legislation from the statute book.

Finally, Clause 3 would abolish the health in pregnancy grant, which is a one-off cash payment of £190 to pregnant women. The previous Government said that it was being introduced in recognition of the importance of a healthy diet during pregnancy. However, there is no requirement for the grant to be spent on better health and well-being; women can spend the money on whatever they want. The grant is not paid until the mother has reached the 25th week of pregnancy, but the evidence shows that, to quote the National Childbirth Trust,

“if dietary intervention is to have an impact on birth weight and outcomes for the baby in later life, it should be started as early as possible”.

The grant is unfocused. It is also untargeted: it is paid to all pregnant women regardless of their income.

This Government recognise the importance of maternal health, but it should be supported through focused and targeted policies such as the Healthy Start scheme. This scheme is effectively focused on supporting health and well-being because it pays support in the form of vouchers rather than cash. It is targeted at pregnant women and children living in low-income households. We will therefore continue the Healthy Start scheme, but the health in pregnancy grant will be abolished for all women who reach the 25th week of pregnancy from January 2011. That will save us £40 million this year and £150 million each year thereafter.

The savings that we are making from the child trust fund, the saving gateway and the health in pregnancy grant allow us to focus our limited resources on our priorities. We are delivering on our commitment that health spending will increase in real terms in each year of this Parliament. We are prioritising fairness and social mobility, including by transforming the prospects of the poorest children through the schools pupil premium, which will be worth £2.5 billion by 2014-15. We have ensured that the spending review will have no measurable impact on child poverty in the next two years.

At the same time, we are tackling Britain’s unprecedented deficit. As I said earlier, we have a clear plan to do that. It involves difficult choices such as those included in this Bill. It was clear from the brief debate last Monday that some noble Lords have strong feelings on these issues, so I look forward to a full debate on them today.

I restate that I believe that these are the right choices. We cannot afford the luxury of spending half a billion pounds a year on the child trust fund for 18 years when the money is not available; we could not have afforded to introduce a new scheme such as the saving gateway; and we cannot afford to keep spending £150 million per year on the untargeted, unfocused health in pregnancy grant.

The savings that we have made through these policies will amount to £370 million this year and around £800 million each year from then on. That means £800 million less in other spending cuts, in tax rises or in even higher borrowing. This Bill puts those choices into action. I beg to move.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Armstrong of Hill Top]

My Lords, my early training was as a social worker and I have continued throughout my career to maintain an interest in looked-after children, as we now call them. I find that a difficult phrase because too often we complain that they have not been sufficiently well looked after. I have also had a lifelong relationship with Action for Children and currently carry out the role of an ambassador for it, which is a bit strange, but there you go. I want to ensure that no one thinks I have interests that I am not talking about.

One of my greatest privileges in my previous job as Minister for the Cabinet Office was being given responsibility for social exclusion. I was challenged by the Prime Minister to take a new look at children in care. That has informed many of my views and concerns about the some of the actions that the Government are now taking.

I was tempted to raise the Fawcett Society report, because the Minister has once again justified everything on the basis of reducing the deficit. Everybody accepts that there is a deficit, but it is claimed that it is our fault. Yet the Minister acknowledges that it was important to bail out Northern Rock; indeed, the Government now feel able to bail out Ireland with £6 billion. I agree with that, but the Minister should temper the way in which he raises the issue. Whatever our view of how the deficit should be tackled, it is absolutely clear that the people who will suffer most from the Bill and the manner in which the Government are imposing their deficit reduction programme are women and children. I do not think that that was the Government’s intention, but it is the effect of their not adopting the approaches to budget assessment that they have been implored to adopt. We were implored to take the same approach. Gender budgeting is not new. Many organisations have urged Governments to take it more seriously. I attended with the Chief Whip in 2007 a United Nations conference in New York which looked exclusively at gender budgeting. The ideas have been around for a long time. It saddens me that the Government forgot about them when looking at how they would cut the deficit.

There is now a lot of debate about how child poverty can be reduced and how children can grow up in a way that enables them to take advantage of their potential. The importance of assets is also recognised. They are more important than they ever were when I was born. Then, very few people could benefit from their parents being able to sell their house, for example; now, it is the expectation among the vast majority of people in this country that they will benefit from some sort of asset transfer. For looked-after children and children from the poorest neighbourhoods, that prospect is still a long way away. That was not the sole reason for introducing child trust funds, but I assure the Minister that it was none the less debated and discussed in think tanks, voluntary organisations and in government when they were being set up.

I know very well the views of the Liberal Democrats—I have listened to them on many occasions in the other place—but I simply disagree. We have to find a way in which our poorest children can have the same rights of expectation as other children take for granted. Building up an asset that they can take advantage of is an important part of giving them the same opportunities that others take for granted. I am prepared to have the debate about whether that was the most effective way, but I none the less will continue to argue that it was a noble aspiration and one that we should not lose. I mainly wanted to intervene because of my concern for looked-after children.

We cannot afford to be complacent. The work done by the noble Earl, Lord Listowel, over many years is to be commended. Many other people in this House have also continued to talk about the needs of looked-after children. But we have such a long way to go. I had the opportunity to go to other countries to look at what was happening. One of the interesting things is that we say that the local authority or the state becomes the corporate parent. Many other countries refuse to do that. I was concerned about something in the contribution of the noble Lord, Lord Newby. He said that looked-after children do not have parents. They mainly do, but the parents simply do not know how to parent or look after their responsibilities.

In many other countries they say, “We are not the substitute parents. We are there to form a bridge between what went wrong with those children when they had to leave home and what is happening to them now”. That is probably a healthier position to be in. We should recognise that it does not matter how damaged the background, the children themselves want to be part of the family and want to know about the parents, even if in many people's judgment that is the worst place they could be.

We take responsibility in this country for the state being the corporate parent. Yet, as I have heard from young person after young person, they leave care with something like £30. That is it. They leave care with virtually nothing. Many of them leave care without the personal resources to be able to cope. I suspect that there is not a parent in this House who would kick their kids out when they were 16 or 18. We have tried to extend the responsibility for leaving care beyond 18, but it does not happen everywhere and it does not always happen. No one in this House who had parental responsibilities would say, “That’s it: you're on your own. You get nothing”. It is a shame on us that we are the corporate parent and yet we are not prepared to take any of the measures that we as individuals would expect to take in respect of our own children.

We are in real difficulty with this Bill because of the money Bill issue. I do not want to run around the technicalities, but the expectation in the other place was that this Bill could be amended here and then returned to the Commons for consideration. Now that cannot happen. Therefore, I want to go further than other Members. It is not good enough to say that the Government will continue to discuss this issue. We have the right to expect today from the Minister an absolute commitment that the Government will legislate to make sure that an equivalent of the child trust fund is made available to children and young people who are in care. It needs to be a statutory provision. If it is not, the Government will be able to say that it is up to local authorities. I agree with the principle of loosening ring-fencing, but the problem is that there is no ring-fencing around the needs of disadvantaged children or for child protection.

When local authorities get their settlement, in the announcement that I expect in the next week, many will have a 30 per cent or even greater reduction in their budget. We are told to expect an average of 28 per cent. Having been responsible for the local government settlement for more years than I care to remember, I know that that means that some will get worse than a 30 per cent reduction and some will have a smaller reduction than that. I predict that the ones that do worse will already be the poorest, given other decisions made by the Government, whereby special grants to local authorities for looking after the most deprived have disappeared. It is almost inevitable that when the settlement comes out it will affect very harshly many of the already most deprived neighbourhoods. In those circumstances, we cannot do this on a wish and a prayer. We have to be convinced that there will be legislation that will defend the interests of looked-after children and make sure that, however small it is, we none the less recognise the importance of their being able to have an asset that they can take with them when they become 18 and leave care.

I understand that the Government are drafting legislation quickly, and I am even prepared to grant that they may not have realised that they would not have the chance to amend the Bill again, but they do not have that opportunity. We need to know that legislation will be brought forward in good time to make sure that looked-after children are looked after by this Government.