Savings Accounts and Health in Pregnancy Grant Bill

I welcome this opportunity to express my views on the concept of saving gateways. I listened with interest to the shadow Minister expressing his desire to save them for the future, but in his defence he missed some of the key pieces of evidence that we had heard in the Bill Committee. I should like to remind him of some of that evidence. Adrian Coles, director general of the Building Societies Association, told us:"““No building society had committed to offering a saving gateway””." Eric Leenders, executive director of the British Bankers Association, said that there were"““only a couple of providers who felt that it was suitably beneficial for them to provide the account””.––[Official Report, Savings Accounts and Health in Pregnancy Grant Public Bill Committee, 2 November 2010; c. 34, Q98.]" The Post Office would participate only if provided with taxpayers' subsidy. It will cost £300 million to continue with the scheme. There was a great deal of debate in Committee about the possibility of the fourth link in that chain being credit unions, and I pay tribute to the hon. Member for Makerfield (Yvonne Fovargue) for her assiduous advocacy of their cause. In a way, she was quite right. I was impressed to hear how many credit unions there were in Makerfield. I think she said that there is one at the end of almost every street, or certainly within walking distance for most of her constituents. We have a very successful one in Blackpool, too, but they would not be available for this purpose in the many parts of the country where the credit union movement has yet to implant itself fully, so we would be left with the kind of postcode lottery against which the shadow Minister was fulminating in the previous debate. We cannot have it both ways.