Financial Inclusion

Part of 1. Questions to the First Minister – in the Senedd at 2:13 pm on 28 January 2020.

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Photo of Mark Drakeford Mark Drakeford Labour 2:13, 28 January 2020

Well, I thank Dawn Bowden for pointing to one of the great social policy experiments of this century. I deeply regret the fact that the child trust fund, launched by Labour in 2002 was abolished by the incoming coalition Government in 2010, because that scheme offered young people and particularly people from disadvantaged communities a chance to begin their adult life with an asset behind them, and in asset-based welfare, the theory is that assets change lives; that, if you have a sum of money that you can rely on, you make different sorts of decisions about your future. Now, we have this great natural experiment because we have these cohorts of young people born from 1 September 2002 until 2011 and the first generation of those children turn 18 in September of this year. There were 273,000 young people in Wales who had child trust fund accounts opened for them and some Members here will remember my colleague, Brian Gibbons, introducing a Welsh addition to those child trust funds, so that children in Wales, when they became primary school age, every child had £50 added to their account; every child from a disadvantaged family had £100 added to their account.

When the child trust fund was set up, Llywydd, the idea was not simply to put money into a child's account, but that that child would be able to track that account throughout their maturity—that, every year, they would have a statement telling them how much was being held for them. By the time they were 16, they were meant to be able to make decisions for themselves about where that fund would be invested. And, when the fund was abolished, unfortunately all of that was abolished as well.

That's why we are fearful, as Dawn Bowden has said, that there could be thousands of young people in Wales in September of this year who have had money invested on their behalf that could provide a platform for them as they go into adult life, who will know nothing about it. That's why my colleague Rebecca Evans wrote to Treasury Ministers on 22 January, urging them to take new action, so that those young people in Wales who have an opportunity to take advantage of their child trust fund will be identified and that we can be confident that, for those young people at least, this opportunity will be genuinely available.