Clause 9
6:30 pm
Ian Pearson (Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Economic and Business), Department for Business, Enterprise & Regulatory Reform; Dudley South, Labour)
To promote a saving culture, we believe that it is important that account holders can see their savings and their maturity payment building up over a period of time to demonstrate the benefits of having saved. We discussed this on amendment 33. I hope that I can assure the hon. Gentleman that it is not necessary or appropriate to include amendment 37. As he will have seen from the draft regulations, we do not intend to specify the form that statements have to take, but simply that they must be issued. This would permit them to be issued electronically and it would be a matter for the account provider to decide. He mentioned the ability to allow account providers to do that.
I draw a distinction between the suggestion that all saving gateway statements should be sent electronically—I can appreciate the environmental appeal of doing something like that—and the requirement that they have to be. I believe that there should be options here. Some account holders may prefer to receive their statements in a hard copy. I do not think that as a Government we should prevent that. We should also be mindful of the fact that not everyone has easy access to e-mail, so electronic communication could be very difficult. While I am sympathetic to the hon. Gentleman’s suggestion, I do not believe that the amendment adds anything to the Bill. Certainly this will all be contained in regulations. The way we intend to frame the regulations would permit statements to be sent electronically if that was felt the most appropriate way of contacting account providers. I hope he will feel able to withdraw his amendment.