New Clause 2
Saving Gateway Accounts Bill
10:00 am
Ian Pearson (Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Economic and Business), Department for Business, Enterprise & Regulatory Reform; Dudley South, Labour)
I understand how my hon. Friend gets to that point of view. As I have explained, the Government’s preferred position is to engender competition so that a wide range of institutions participate and offer saving gateway accounts. We hope that a number of those institutions will want to offer interest on those accounts, as well as good default options, so that people wanting to open a saving gateway account will have a choice of places to go.
The advice that I have received and the detailed work that we have done on the cost of operating saving gateway accounts clearly shows that there are costs involved in opening accounts for significant numbers of people who will be saving relatively small amounts of money. I ask my hon. Friend to take that into account. It is not as simple as he suggests. He says that banks are being given free money to expand their customer base, but it is not like that.