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Saving Gateway Accounts Bill

I suspect that, despite the worked examples, the expectation is that no interest will be paid on the accounts and that the return for investors will purely be the matching bonus paid for by the taxpayer—not interest paid by the bank, the body with custody of the money. The return will be off the back of the bonus that the Government will provide. One challenge, and one issue that we need to flush out—not necessarily today, but in Committee—is to understand the economics of the model for the provider. Will other bank account customers end up subsidising the provision of the saving gateway accounts? We need to understand the issue clearly, because the extent to which the product is uneconomic for banks will limit its availability. That was one of the lessons of the Sandler review on savings and basic stakeholder products: because it was uneconomic to provide them, no one did so. That undermined the Government's initiative to try to tackle financial exclusion.