Saving Gateway Accounts Bill
10:45 am
Matthew Wakefield: I think that the findings you are referring to probably come from the second evaluation, so maybe I should respond first.
When we carried out the quantitative assessment we found that the groups that had possibly increased their amount of savings were from the lower income subsets—the groups that had less than approximately £16,000 of annual income—so that conforms quite well with what is in the Bill. We found that for those people, it was clear that this account was resulting in more money in cash savings—which is not surprising, this is a cash savings product. It also appears that they were spending less than they would otherwise have done on certain things—in particular, food eaten outside the home, which is something that you might think is a luxury and it was not so bad that people were cutting back on it. Maybe it is good that they found savings from somewhere. You are right that we did not find any significant increase in their net wealth. Those three findings are quite messy. As those carrying out such data work will know, those three things should have added up: if there was any real increase in the savings coming from expenditure, then there should have been an increase in net wealth. We did not find that statistically significant: it may be that net wealth is too hard to measure. The evidence suggests that there may have been some increase in savings and net wealth, but it is hard to pin that down—there might have been a small increase, and it is for that lower income group. I think that that conforms quite well with what is in the Bill, and that the criteria for restricting saving gateway to a lower income subset have been carefully designed to discourage groups with more available wealth—which is not new saving—from moving it into this account.
Judging whether this account is creating new net wealth is very difficult unless the methodologies are repeated: it is hard to know the net wealth that that set of people would have had if they had not been offered the account.