Child Trust Funds

Debate between Ed Davey and Alex Cunningham

Tuesday 19th March 2024 Westminster Hall

[Alex Cunningham (Stockton North) (Lab)]

It is a special pleasure to serve under your chairmanship this afternoon, Ms Elliott. I pay tribute to the right hon. Member for Horsham (Sir Jeremy Quin) for securing this debate on behalf of his constituent Andrew Turner. I congratulate him on his detailed speech, which outlined very clearly the challenge before us.

I also want to comment on the speech from the right hon. Member for Kingston and Surbiton (Ed Davey). I am grateful to him for sharing his personal experience of engaging with the system with his son, John. He demonstrated a special empathy for other parents of children with challenging disabilities. He offered solutions, and I remind the House of his most important statement: that people are just after their own money. He also spoke of the need for a simpler system.

That point was repeated by the hon. Member for Devizes (Danny Kruger)—I have just found out how to pronounce his constituency properly, so I hope I did it justice this time—who lamented the fact that we no longer have the children’s trust fund, which was set up by the Labour Government. He tried to blame the right hon. Member for Kingston and Surbiton, but it was the right hon. Gentleman’s colleague in the Treasury—the same person who axed the hospital that was planned in my constituency. Health inequalities have widened ever since, and the hospital is not even on the Government’s new list. The hon. Member for Devizes confirmed that there is consensus in the Chamber that we need action: he said, “Simply give them the money,” which is a good thing for me to mention at the beginning of my speech.

Andrew’s fervent campaign to bring about change stems from the challenges faced by his family, who have come up against tremendous problems along the way as they have tried simply to get access to the money they saved for their son Mikey. We heard about the distress faced by Mikey’s family and others, and also about the deeply disturbing legal advice that Andrew received: that it would be easier and cheaper to wait until Mikey died, because a simpler process could then be used. I cannot find the words to describe the anguish I would feel in such circumstances.

Andrew has become an advocate for the many parents of children with disabilities who all too often come up against these barriers. I pay tribute to him and charities such as Contact for their hard work on this issue. I also thank the other parent campaigners—Nasreen Yasin, Claire Binney, Michele Creed and Ramandeep Kaur, as well as Rachel Dixon, John Roberts and their son, Joseph—for joining us today.

Under the fund introduced in 2005, every child born in the UK between September 2002 and January 2011 received up to £500 in Government vouchers as an incentive for their parents and guardians to open a savings account for them. That initiative was ditched by the coalition Government in 2011, when the junior ISA was created. Disabled children and those from low-income families received an additional amount to provide greater benefits in later life. The trust money was then locked away, and parents were able to add more to the account each year until the child turned 18. Again, as we have heard, parents of children who lack the mental capacity to manage their finances themselves when they turn 18 face making a deputyship application to the Court of Protection to access their child trust fund or junior ISA.

The Ministry of Justice estimates that between 63,000 and 126,000 young people may fall into that category, yet the Court of Protection approved only 15 applications in 2021. The Minister will be aware that Andrew wrote to the Lord Chancellor yesterday outlining the scale of the challenge. He highlighted that, since 2020, an estimated 31,488 disabled young people have been unable to access £72.4 million of child trust fund and junior ISA savings.

The Public Accounts Committee looked into this matter and highlighted reports of families finding the deputyship application process difficult, time-consuming and costly. Fees are waived if families are applying to access a child trust fund, but there are other barriers. The Committee heard that a six-page GP letter is needed as part of the process. The Down’s Syndrome Association said in evidence that low awareness of banking safeguards among the parents it supports is also a barrier to accessing their child’s trust fund. It explained that the fee waiver does not apply if the young adult is still in education, and that many families believe that they still need to pay for the services of a solicitor.

I recognise that the Government have considered measures they hoped would address the problem over the years, but the legislation and processes put in place to support individuals and their families should be much more accessible. We need closer working between the finance industry and Departments to find a workable solution to this ongoing problem. That would have the potential to significantly increase accessibility, helping many more families to access savings locked in child trust funds and junior ISAs.

I agree with the statement from Una Summerson, head of policy and public affairs at Contact. She said that implementing a less restrictive approach is in the best interests of disabled young people. Disabled young people must be allowed to enjoy their savings like everybody else, and continuing to promote actions that fail to address this issue will simply perpetuate injustice. There is an opportunity to bring common sense into the debate and to commit to a new approach.

[Ed Davey]

The hon. Gentleman has made a powerful speech, and I thank him for his kind comments. We all hope that the Minister will take the opportunity to tell us that the Government will look at the issue again and will make changes, but does the hon. Gentleman agree that if this Government fail to make changes, at the next election and in the next Parliament, it is vital that his party, working with others, makes those changes?

[Alex Cunningham]

Yes. Whichever Government are in power, they have to make the changes necessary to make it much easier for people to access the funds. I do not know what the mechanism will be, but I think we can all say that the next Government, of either colour, will deliver on that particular promise, but the Minister might get this sorted before we have that general election. Today might have been the last day the Prime Minister could have called the election, but we still have a few hours to go—bring that on!

The Government referred in their consultation response to clear evidence of the challenges in the current system, with the Court of Protection property and affairs application forms being too lengthy and complex, and the time taken between completing the application to the final order being made being too long and disproportionate for the sums involved. Instead of a wholesale change, however, the Government opted for incremental changes to the current court process. In 2023, the Ministry of Justice created a toolkit for parent carers on making financial decisions and implemented a new digital process for property and affairs deputy order applications, which was rolled out last year and is set to speed up the process. Users can complete some of the court forms electronically and can digitally submit remaining paperwork.

Sadly, Contact tells me that none of the Government’s piecemeal changes has meaningfully simplified the court process or made it more accessible for families with no legal experience. The Government’s strategy is not working. If their intended aim was to have a process that was as accessible as possible, it simply has not been achieved. I hope that the Minister will outline the impact that those changes have had on application processing times, addressing whether future digitalisation of Court of Protection processes is planned, and outline exactly how the Government will remove those blockages to the funds once and for all. Let them have their own money!

Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Ed Davey and Alex Cunningham

Thursday 5th February 2015 Commons Chamber

[Mr Davey]

I think the hon. Gentleman is muddling a few things. I talked to Commissioner Miguel Cañete, who showed me the draft of the EU’s INDC—and I am afraid that it is rather more high level than the hon. Gentleman suggests. The EU’s INDC will, I think, be published and go to the Energy Council or perhaps the Environment Council at the end of this month, and it will not go into that level of detail. The hon. Gentleman might want to take up his point with the commissioner.

[Alex Cunningham]

Government data show that more than 16,000 households in the north-east of England have spent in total £1.6 million on green deal assessments, but that only 140 have benefited from energy efficiency measures costing £500,000—a net loss of £1.1 million for householders. Will the Minister just face the facts and admit that the green deal is simply not working?

[Mr Davey]

I do not recognise the hon. Gentleman’s figures. Let me gently tell him that the figures he mentions relate to people who invested in the green deal following the original assessment, and people might not have used green deal finance as a way of financing their investment. All the evidence shows that many people are using their own finances and savings; for some, it is a remortgage, and others are borrowing in other ways. I would have thought that what the hon. Gentleman, I and the whole House would be interested in is improving the nation’s building stock—not whether people use a particular form of consumer credit.

Energy Bills

Debate between Ed Davey and Alex Cunningham

Monday 2nd December 2013 Commons Chamber

[Mr Davey]

It would be worse than that: it would be the poor old consumers who did so, because the cost of capital would go up. There would also be a reduction in investment in green energy, which the Opposition claim to support, so the Opposition’s policy is both irresponsible and reckless.

[Alex Cunningham (Stockton North) (Lab)]

Around 100 people from my constituency, and hundreds more, face two extra hours on their working day after npower announced it was closing its Thornaby office, and that those people would therefore have further to travel. The company says that it is doing that, and sacking hundreds more and transferring the jobs to India, to help keep bills down. Has npower told the Secretary of State how much bills will come down by, at the expense of those lost and transferred jobs?

[Mr Davey]

This was discussed in a little more depth in oral questions to the Department of Energy and Climate Change last week. I made it clear that other Secretaries of State, particularly my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills, and I will look at what we can do to help people who are affected by npower’s redundancy package.

Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Ed Davey and Alex Cunningham

Thursday 17th October 2013 Commons Chamber

[Mr Davey]

Millions are seeing benefits from our policy of competition. The right hon. Lady has made a very interesting point today. In response to our charge that Labour’s policy is a con, because energy companies could push up bills beforehand and after, she said that Labour would take action if they do. Does that mean that she is going to introduce full price regulation? Is Labour now promising that, because that is the implication of what she said?

[Alex Cunningham (Stockton North) (Lab)]

3. What steps he is taking to help households improve their energy efficiency.

Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Ed Davey and Alex Cunningham

Thursday 31st March 2011 Commons Chamber

[Mr Davey]

My hon. Friend is exactly right, so I hope he welcomes the statement that I have made today on this very issue. Following a consultation launched by the previous Government, we have concluded that action needs to be taken on phoenix companies when assets are sold to connected parties without open marketing. Our proposals, which are in the statement, include insolvency practitioners giving three days’ notice to all creditors before the sale, which we think will be valuable.

[Alex Cunningham (Stockton North) (Lab)]

T7. The proposed changes to the feed-in tariff for solar energy projects has dealt the industry a massive body blow and left in tatters plans by Norton sports and social club in my constituency to build one to finance their community work. How many more projects have been deferred, and what does the Secretary of State have to say to this job-creating industry?