Saving Gateway Accounts Bill

My Lords, Amendment 10 would insert a new clause before Clause 11 setting out a requirement for annual information flows to Parliament. We will later come to a government amendment that will require an independent review of the saving gateway account scheme, but this does not report for seven years. In the mean time, Parliament will need to vote each year a significant amount of public money to fund this scheme. The Government’s estimates are for £100 million in the first three years, falling to £60 million a year after that. There is no provision in this Bill for any information on the progress of the scheme to support that. The Minister in the other place and the noble Lord have made vague promises of information being made available to Parliament, but there has been nothing concrete. We have been invited to trust HMRC to do the right thing on the basis that it is good at providing information on ISAs and on child trust funds. I am not convinced that HMRC’s history justifies that confidence. It certainly has provided regular information, but it has been like getting blood out of a stone to get any further information, whether by Written Question or otherwise. It seems that HMRC decides on the information that it wants to provide and gears up to do that; if it does not align with what parliamentary or other users want, that is tough. If we had our time again with the ISA or trust fund legislation, I suspect that we would be taking the same approach as I am taking with Amendment 10. While HMRC has responsibility for the saving gateway scheme under this Bill, in practice information about eligibility will be held by the Department for Work and Pensions and not by HMRC. In Grand Committee, I argued—admittedly unsuccessfully—that DWP should be in the lead, rather than HMRC. I will wager that, if information provision is left to HMRC, it will not give any information that could be relevant, such as analyses of take-up or eligibility by benefit type. One of the things that we know for sure about HMRC is that it cannot see beyond its own backyard. That is why my amendment would place the information requirement on the Treasury rather than on HMRC, so that a wider base of information could be addressed. That is the background to the approach of Amendment 10, which specifies what information, as a minimum, Parliament should receive on an annual basis. This covers information about eligibility and take-up, about maturity payments and early closure of accounts and about the universe of account providers. This is clearly not all the information that could be provided and there is clearly no bar to further information. It does, however, set down a basic data set, which should not be onerous for the Treasury to collect. I hope that the Minister now sees the logic for a minimum information requirement to be hard-wired into this Bill. I beg to move.