Savings Accounts and Health in Pregnancy Grant Bill

Debate between Bill Esterson and Paul Maynard

Monday 22nd November 2010 Commons Chamber

[Paul Maynard]

I welcome this opportunity to express my views on the concept of saving gateways. I listened with interest to the shadow Minister expressing his desire to save them for the future, but in his defence he missed some of the key pieces of evidence that we heard in the Bill Committee. I should like to remind him of some of that evidence. Adrian Coles, director general of the Building Societies Association, told us:

“No building society had committed to offering a saving gateway”.

Eric Leenders, executive director of the British Bankers Association, said that there were

“only a couple of providers who felt that it was suitably beneficial for them to provide the account”.––[Official Report, Savings Accounts and Health in Pregnancy Grant Public Bill Committee, 2 November 2010; c. 34, Q98.]

The Post Office would participate only if provided with taxpayers’ subsidy. It will cost £300 million to continue with the scheme.

There was a great deal of debate in Committee about the possibility of the fourth link in that chain being credit unions, and I pay tribute to the hon. Member for Makerfield (Yvonne Fovargue) for her assiduous advocacy of their cause. In a way, she was quite right. I was impressed to hear how many credit unions there were in Makerfield. I think she said that there is one at the end of almost every street, or certainly within walking distance for most of her constituents. We have a very successful one in Blackpool, too, but they would not be available for this purpose in the many parts of the country where the credit union movement has yet to implant itself fully, so we would be left with the kind of postcode lottery against which the shadow Minister was fulminating in the previous debate. We cannot have it both ways.

[Bill Esterson]

The hon. Gentleman describes a lack of credit unions in certain parts of the country, which is precisely why the opportunity to have the saving gateway is so important. Does he not appreciate that Government input into helping lower-income families to save is exactly what is needed to provide the necessary impetus?

[Paul Maynard]

Unfortunately, the hon. Gentleman’s point was not borne out by the evidence of Mark Lyonette of the Association of British Credit Unions Ltd. He was quite clear when he said of the saving gateway:

“None of the credit unions built their business plan around it, so I don’t think its withdrawal is a threat to the health of credit unions.”––[Official Report, Savings Accounts and Health in Pregnancy Grant Public Bill Committee, 2 November 2010; c. 52, Q149.]

It is important to ensure that we give credit unions what they want, and that is why we are seeing reforms to the Credit Unions Act 1979 enabling them to work with more than just individuals—they will now be able to work with interest groups, social enterprises and the like. We should not therefore allow the Opposition’s statement that credit unions have to be involved to obstruct the fact that this scheme will cost £300 million to continue. This might cause some Opposition Members to roll their eyes and shake their heads, as they did earlier in response to my hon. Friend the Member for Truro and Falmouth (Sarah Newton), but we are now living in a very different fiscal situation. The shadow Minister was quite right: the Government have changed, and we now have to take tougher financial decisions. We cannot justify spending £300 million on a saving gateway that will not be universally accessible across the country because there simply are not enough commercial providers willing to provide it. This is not a debate about a group hug, or about trying to encourage everyone to save more. We all know about those things.

I have been delighted to hear the hon. Member for Makerfield talk about Brighthouse, of which there is a branch in my constituency. I almost thought that she must have sneaked into my surgeries, because her tales about her voters’ problems with Brighthouse were the same as mine. However, I do not think that the saving gateway is the answer to the problems that many poor people face in getting access to cheap credit. It is not the answer to the problems we have been discussing. It fails the test that I raised on Second Reading—a test that I call my rhododendron test. The Opposition have a tendency to fixate on a single item of legislation that they believe will somehow solve all the problems in the world, but I am afraid that the saving gateway, however popular the pilots might have been, has not been popular enough with the providers that we need to ensure its success. That is why I support the Government’s decision to remove the scheme.