Saving Gateway Accounts Regulations 2009

My Lords, I thank the Minister for introducing these regulations and I congratulate the Treasury on heeding the report of the Joint Committee on Statutory Instruments in July and on tabling revised regulations to take account of that report. The Minister will be aware that I tabled a Motion in July to ensure that the report of the Joint Committee was taken into account and I am glad that the Treasury has done so with these revised regulations. As the Minister said, we debated the content of the regulations in draft form fairly extensively throughout our deliberations on the Bill, so there is little that we find unexpected in the regulations that we have before us, which should cut down the time that we take today. I have just one prior point for the Minister. In talking about the saving gateway scheme, he said that an account holder would get 50p from the Government. In fact, the 50p savings incentive will come from the taxpayer. We must never forget that the scheme has to provide value for money to the taxpayer; it must represent a good use of money in the effect that it has on savings in the target community. We look forward to the report that will be made on the saving gateway scheme, which the Government produced an amendment for in the final stages of the Bill. However, that is some way off, so I just confine my remarks to reminding the Minister that it is taxpayers’ money, not the Government’s. There are two areas where I want to question the Minister, the first of which relates to timing. I want to press him to say when the Act will be commenced and, following on from that, when the scheme will be commenced. I think that he said something like "in due course", which is one of those phrases that are designed to convey no information whatever. Therefore, I ask the Minister to be a little more precise if he possibly can be about when the Government expect to start the scheme and have it up and running and capable of receiving money by way of the relevant savings accounts. The other area on which I want to press the Minister is account providers. I had hoped that he would give details of the account providers who would be likely to come forward. He will recall that during our deliberations on the Bill we had many discussions about the economics of saving gateway accounts and whether account providers would want to come forward. We knew that many wanted to take part, including the Post Office, but that the economics were a potential difficulty. The Minister has said some warm words about good discussions and about banks potentially coming forward, but I heard no specifics whatever during the passage of the Bill. Several months have elapsed since then and I had hoped that we could get a better idea of whether there would indeed be a diversity of saving gateway account providers. As the Minister will be aware, the aim behind the Bill has all-party support and, therefore, we want to see this experiment take place and be judged properly. A proper experiment cannot take place unless there is proper diversity of account providers, so I hope that the Minister can go a little further than the rather careful words that he used in that respect.