Savings Accounts and Health in Pregnancy Grant Bill

Baroness Drake Excerpts

Tuesday 7th December 2010 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Drake]

My Lords, fairness dictates that the savings gateway and the children’s trust fund are worthy of greater consideration than straightforward abolition. Issues of affordability could be addressed by greater targeting and deferment. Policies focused on improving benefits and policies directed at asset-building for lower-income groups should not be seen as alternatives. It is not a matter of choosing either/or but of recognising that addressing inequality is a complex challenge.

I always fear what I call the “rational” paternalism that argues that those on lower incomes should not aspire to save and accumulate assets, should not expect government policies that allow them to do so, should have to accept that the market will not cater for them and must forgo the greater control which assets can bring over household debt. Meanwhile, the systemic inequalities in asset distribution simply get worse. I wonder how rigorous the impact assessment of this Bill has been, because while income inequality attracts greater attention, assets are far more unevenly distributed. Financial inclusion policy persistently fails to take adequate account of asset fund-building policies, despite the fact that assets directly affect financial inclusion.

As has been said, more than 60 per cent of black and Asian people in the UK have no savings at all. Women have 40 per cent less than men. Lack of assets is a problem for people who run into financial difficulties—lack of control takes over. Poor people who lack rainy-day savings are exposed to subprime and even illegal lending practices. Savings provide an alternative to high-cost credit and have the potential to change the long-term flow of money within a family. Those without savings are exposed to high charges for other products, such as insurance. Owning assets has an impact on confidence, sense of control and willingness to engage.

There is a difference between recognising the public spending challenge, and so moving to targeting, and deconstructing the complete edifice, which is what the Bill does. The child trust fund gave a real kick-start to the savings accounts of children of people on lower incomes. It overcame inertia, combining auto-enrolment with a strong and simple incentive. It made the provision of such a savings product for lower-income families more attractive to the financial markets. It allowed providers to do some cross-subsidy between their richer and poorer clients. It increased accessibility to a savings product for low-income groups. The product was taken to them; they did not have to search the market. The momentum that has built up in this product—75 per cent take-up is pretty high, compared with a lot of products—could have been sustained over the longer term.

Particularly regrettable, as so many noble Lords have said, is the abolition of the trust fund for children in care—some of the most vulnerable and least well placed in terms of assets. Who will look after the asset accumulation of our vulnerable children in care now? In response to the noble Lord, Lord Newby, is it so wrong for children in care to get a windfall asset? They certainly will not get the windfall asset of a tax-free inheritance, up to about £325,000. I ask the Minister to seek from the Government a commitment to continue such payments and, if the vehicle is a junior ISA, to require payments to be made into that account. An annual payment of the order of, for example, £100 would be small in the scheme of things, but it would make a real difference to those individual children.

I also ask the Minister whether the Government will commit to addressing this issue in another piece of legislation if it is not possible to amend the Bill. I refer to the comment of the Prime Minister at Question Time on 30 June 2010, when he said:

“We really do need to do better as a country”,

for care leavers. He went on to say that,

“children leaving care aged 18 have … no one to help them”.—[Official Report, Commons, 30/6/10; col. 857.]

Here is a chance for the Government to help those children in care and to meet the aspiration that the Prime Minister himself articulated.

Child trust funds for disabled children worked alongside the benefits system. Although the Government have said that they will redirect some of the abolished payments for short-break provision, does such provision and asset-building for disabled children truly have to be mutually exclusive? Is it not possible for the brains of the Treasury to find a more worthy set of candidates who could bear the marginal contribution to the public debt of making those modest payments to disabled children? Could the Minister not give an assurance that they will consider maintaining even a modest payment for those children and, when more benign economic circumstances allow, making those payments more generous?

What about the impact on ethnic minority children? The BME age profile is much younger than the national average. Proportionately more of them would be able to receive a trust fund. That is important because the low level of assets held by black and minority ethnic parents means that they will be less able to benefit from familial redistribution.

Notwithstanding what has been said, I fear that the Government are dismantling the child trust fund and replacing it with a savings vehicle which will widen inequality and undermine the behavioural momentum that was being built up for low-income groups. Junior ISAs will provide tax-free returns, but there is a public cost to extending that tax-free element. It is revenue forgone, and it is affluent parents who will secure the greatest benefit on behalf of their children. It is much less likely that junior ISAs will be as effective in increasing the level of new savings. If that is the concern, then these junior ISAs will probably deliver less, because many low and moderate earners simply will not engage with such mainstream products. The trust fund worked because the product was taken to them. It took away the inhibitions and the complexities of engagement that many financial products involved.

Let us again consider BME people. Not only do they have lower amounts of savings; they utilise mainstream financial products even less, in particular ISAs. If junior ISAs are to substitute for the child trust fund, do the Government intend to consider this deficit of engagement with mainstream financial products particularly among low-income and BME families?

There is another important difference. An ISA is run on an annual renewal basis, whereas a child trust fund is run as a trust over a much longer period. This is an important distinction. The financial services industry often takes advantage of inertia. Customers are frequently defaulted into ISA products with extremely low interest rates, and even interest rates on fixed-term cash ISAs are frequently below the returns available on non-tax-exempt products, thereby undermining the public policy intention of introducing the ISAs in the first place. If the Government are to introduce ISAs for children, will they take action in designing them to hold the markets to account for the practices I have described? ISAs are not trusts.

Statistics reveal that lower-income families’ contributions to their children’s trust funds formed a greater percentage of their income: 1.14 per cent, compared with 0.76 per cent for more wealthy families. Who says that poor people do not want to care for their children? Those who do contribute give up, on average, a higher percentage of their family income. Families earning £16,000 or less have on average been saving £15 a month into the funds. That momentum might well have been maintained but now we will never know. If we are to help poor people to build assets, we are going to have to start again with that momentum and engagement. Seventy-five per cent was a jolly good start compared with some products. I wish that one could get that level of engagement in free contributions from employers to occupational pension schemes. It would be so much better if the Government targeted even a modest amount of money on the most disadvantaged children.

Similarly with the abolition of the saving gateway, the effect of the Bill means that although we will have a relatively generous pension and inheritance tax system, the two incentivised savings products for low-income households and their children will be scrapped. The issue of affordability will not be addressed by targeting. Providing low-cost products for low-income savers will always be a challenge for the financial services industry. Put at its simplest, such products do not provide an attractive profit. That is precisely why government support for initiatives such as the savings gateway is so important for meeting a market gap. By withdrawing so absolutely from the savings gateway, the Government have simply heightened the political risk for financial services organisations of investing in savings products for lower-income groups. Who is going to do that now? When people have built up such savings, they have been downed and no one knows what the future might hold.

The Government admit to the possibility of returning to the issue because they know, as everyone else does, that interfacing with the financial services industry is a persistent problem for low-income people. Why cannot the savings gateway be deferred, or its introduction phased in, so that the positive gains from the project can be banked, so that those parts of the financial services industry that have engaged can remain engaged and so that the cost could be minimised in the short term and highly targeted in the long term? Why scrap? You could make a huge contribution to the issue of affordability without downing the edifice and abolishing in the way proposed.

I recognise that a financial advice service is to be rolled out and that that is a real positive. Citizens have a right to enjoy financial advice and to be given guidance on how to exercise their financial interests and responsibilities. However, there are reams and reams and books of evidence to show that advice often does not lead to active decisions to save, particularly among low-to-moderate earners. The DWP has trialled schemes with employers but advice has not translated into action, which is why nudging, powerfully incentivised and well designed default products are so important to increasing saving. Instead of targeting and keeping the remnants—keeping some of that edifice alive—all the work is being abolished.

Finally, financial education for children is likely to have much more impact if all children, the poor as well as the affluent, have a sum of money in an account with their name on it. That would have much more meaning.