Child Trust Fund

Lord Soley Excerpts

Monday 28th February 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Sassoon]

My Lords, I very much appreciate that the noble Earl, Lord Listowel, keeps these important issues under discussion and alive in our thinking. It is important for all children to understand how to handle money, to be able to make the decisions that they need to start making as soon as they leave school and move on. This is not just a matter of amounts of money that are put aside, but of making sure that the mechanisms are there for all children to learn how to handle their finances as they progress through life.

As to the question of a statutory basis, as and when we come up with the detailed plans for the junior ISA, of course draft regulations will be issued for comment. I cannot confirm that there will be special provision other than in the terms that I mentioned whereby accounts can be set up for children in care to which local authorities and others can contribute.

[Lord Soley]

Does the Minister accept that one reason for having the child trust fund was to encourage the culture of saving? It affects not just children in care but children from families which are poor or where the parents are not that competent, and who may leave school without any savings or culture of savings. Will the Minister get all the Ministers who are dealing with this to think how much money they have given to their own children to make sure that they survive in future life, and then to ask themselves how a child coming from such a background as described is expected to survive without the help of the child trust fund or the savings culture that it inspired?

[Lord Sassoon]

My Lords, very difficult choices have to be made at a time when we have been left with the biggest deficit in our peacetime history.