Clause 1 - Child trust funds
Child Trust Funds Bill
9:30 am
Mr George Osborne (Tatton, Conservative)
Thank you, Mr. Benton. I promise that you will not need to work as hard in Committee as you have just have done by calling out all the amendments. It will be a pleasure to work under your guidance. I welcome you to the Chair and the Minister to the Committee. As I have said to the hon. Lady before, the Conservative association in my constituency is twinned with the Conservative association in her constituency. Her seat is our target seat, although such ideas proved singly unsuccessful in the previous election and in 1997 when the Conservative party lost my constituency in the process of targeting hers. However, it will be a great pleasure to shadow the hon. Lady in Committee.
My big group of amendments seeks to achieve a simple objective: to change the name of the policy that we shall be discussing from ''child trust funds'' to ''baby bonds'' to put the Committee in touch with the real world. No one in the real world calls such measures child trust funds; they are called baby bonds. I searched the internet and found out that, during the past month, 254 references were made in the national press to baby bonds. Each headline in respect of the policy refers to baby bonds.
The public describe the measure as ''baby bonds''. I received a Christmas card from Mrs. Warden in Hampshire, which is hundreds of miles from my constituency, in which she wrote:
''Gordon Brown's 'BABY BOND' another gimmick! I look in on the House daily, does Ruth Kelly know what she is doing''.
On 29 December, a letter from Mr. Andy Clark from Crawley, West Sussex was printed in The Sun. He wrote:
''It would be better for Chancellor Gordon Brown to channel the money from the proposed baby bonds into the NHS''.
Indeed, if anyone was interested in what they were doing today, I suspect that many members of the Committee would say that they were members of the baby bond Committee.