Saving Gateway Accounts Bill

The amendment would insert a new clause before Clause 11. My previous amendment focused on information on some basic facts being provided to Parliament annually. This amendment is rather different, although the provision of information to Parliament is a common theme. Amendment 40 would require the Treasury to appoint an independent person to carry out a review of the effectiveness of saving gateway accounts and to prepare a report, which would be laid before Parliament and published. The report is intended to cover much more territory than the previous amendment, and the two amendments are not mutually exclusive. In subsection (2) of the proposed new clause, I have listed the matters that should be included in the review, which includes a catch-all for, ""any other matters which the independent reviewer considers relevant to a consideration of the effectiveness of Saving Gateway accounts"." The specific requirements are listed in subsection (2) and include take-up, the extent of regular savings both before and after maturity and, importantly, what happens when the two years are up. Here we need more information than has been available from the limited data provided by the early pilots. Subsection (2)(c) refers to the, ""barriers to the wide use of Saving Gateway accounts"." That is predicated on there being not a high enough take-up, which may prove to be incorrect. My assumption is that there is some further learning to do about what will entice lower-income people into regular saving. The average for child trust funds is that only 75 per cent are opened by the parent, while 25 per cent are not opened. There is quite a lot of variation within that, but it is quite simple to open such a fund. It does not even require you to go and put money in; it requires you only to open the account. So it is quite likely on the basis of the child trust fund experience that take-up will be somewhat lower. If we are genuinely trying to kick-start this process, it is important to keep a view of what prevents people from opening saving gateway accounts. Paragraph (d) deals with the need for the provision of financial education. This was touched on in the first day of Committee and is one issue that was not resolved during the pilots. It is unclear to what extent the saving gateway scheme will stand or fall by the financial education that is hard-wired into it. The Thoresen review, which we discussed on our first day in Committee, is still only at its pre-large-scale pilot stage. By the time this review would take place, there might well be some important information from those pilots. Indeed, there may be other sources of information to draw on. As to timing, I have suggested in subsection (3) of my new clause that the review should be carried out four years after the saving gateway scheme gets going and should be completed within one year. I am flexible on timing, but that seemed to be a good sighting shot at the sort of period in which it would be reasonable to take a look at what had actually happened. Post-legislative scrutiny should be an important aspect of our approach to any new legislation that charts new territory, which saving gateway accounts qualify as. There probably ought to be a default position that all Bills with new policy requirements—anything other than tidying-up Bills—should have some form of post-legislative scrutiny, unless a case is made that that would be unnecessary. The default position should be that post-legislative scrutiny is embedded in any Bill that comes forward. I accept that that is part of a bigger proposition and is a debate for another day, but in the context of this scheme it would be wise of the Government to ensure that post-legislative scrutiny was provided for. I have set out one way in which that could be achieved. I beg to move.