Clause 7 - Transfers
Child Trust Funds Bill
1:00 am
Mr David Laws (Yeovil, Liberal Democrat)
I beg to move amendment No. 171, in
clause 7, page 4, line 27, at end add—
'(c) additional charges can be imposed by providers for transfers allowable under this section, including the maximum amount of such additional charges.'.
The hon. Member for Tatton has been refreshingly candid about some of his amendments, so I start by acknowledging that I am not sure that I have framed mine in precisely the way that I intended. I shall describe this—as we do when we are not sure that an amendment has been framed as precisely as we would
want—as a probing amendment. The clause allows for transfers of CTF accounts. It gives the Treasury the power to make regulations to allow a responsible person to change an account from, for example, a cash to a stakeholder account, or to move an account from one provider to another.
To some extent, the discussion of amendment No. 150 returned us to a debate that the Committee had on the first day of our proceedings, when the Minister was asked what she had in mind for the charges that will be allowable for the management of CTF accounts. Amendment No. 171 invites her to tell us more about what charges she envisages applying to transfers, either between two CTF accounts with the same provider, or from one CTF provider to another. Does she intend that such potential costs will be covered by the charge cap that will be set for all CTF accounts? Will there be special provision for charges to apply in those circumstances? I put directly to the Minister the question that I wanted to ask earlier: when shall we know the levels of charge and the charge cap? We are waiting for them in advance of the publication of the regulations.