Saving Gateway Accounts Bill

The Bill is a small step towards ensuring that this country rediscovers the savings culture. Our long-term prosperity will be built not on spend now, worry about it tomorrow but on savings and investment for the future. This is a small but important step. We must drive discipline through the income scale. The Bill is about low earners, but the savings culture is relevant to everyone, wherever on the scale they appear, because they all have costly needs and demands. When people lose their job, it does not matter whether they are earning £10,000 or £100,000, they find themselves in difficulties. We must ensure that in future, people put some money aside for a rainy day. We must remember that although the current financial crisis was not caused by people on low incomes, they are too often paying the price. Credit is drying up at their end of the scale as well, and they are struggling even more to gain affordable credit. As a result, they are being forced deeper into the arms of loan sharks charging exorbitant rates. We talk about putting things on the never-never, but as we know, as soon as someone misses a payment to loan sharks, they are on the doorstep making their life extremely difficult and miserable. I need to be able to sell the Bill in Broxbourne, because it will be relevant to many of my constituents. I hope that the Minister and his civil servants will put together a pack of information leaflets, brochures and so on so that I can play my part in selling it to my constituents and getting the citizens advice bureau involved. I want to play an active part in giving it the push that it deserves. I congratulate the Minister on all his work on the Bill. I hope that when he gets back to his office this afternoon the phone will be ringing off the hook, with all the chastened chief executives of major clearing banks calling him up and demanding the chance to deliver this initiative as soon as it comes into being next year. It has been a great pleasure to serve on the Public Bill Committee and to participate in the Bill’s various parliamentary stages. I wish it the best of luck.