Child Trust Funds (Amendment) Regulations 2010

Opposing any payment to disabled or severely disabled children seems churlish and heartless. However, we have consistently opposed the child trust funds. The fact that more money is being poured into an initiative that we have never supported does not mean that we support it, however worthy the recipients. The Minister talked about the debate in the Commons. Unless I misread Hansard—and it is possible that I have—I do not think that there was a debate in the Commons. The statutory instrument was agreed without debate. Therefore, it is wrong for him to say that we supported this in the Commons. I agree with almost everything that the noble Baroness said except about the lack of evidence. It would be very difficult to have evidence in a case such as this one, where one is putting money into a pot that cannot be realised for a significant number of years. Our opposition to child trust funds is based on experience rather than evidence, and on what we know from our own experience about the consumption patterns of teenagers. It has been our view from the start that this is not an effective way of spending government money; that the incentive for additional payments would inevitably benefit those with above-average incomes; and, therefore, that the distribution effects of the programme are not what we would want to see. The Minister said that 75 per cent of parents are exercising discretion about where the funds go, but what proportion of parents in the poorest constituencies are exercising this discretion? The evidence in the past has been that the poorest families have not taken up the opportunity to invest the funds and that they may almost be unaware of the funds’ existence. We simply do not believe that the child trust fund is the most effective use of government money. To spend more money on it seems, at this point, perverse, and I am pretty confident that whichever Government are in power during the next Parliament, the scope of child trust funds will be severely restricted if the scheme is not abolished in total.