Baroness Neville-Rolfe (Con)

My Lords, I am grateful to all noble Lords who have contributed to this interesting debate. I much look forward to the Minister’s response, particularly on child trust funds for those in that capacity. I agree with my noble friend Lord Mackinlay that we have a problem with HMRC administration of estates, with the risk of more chaos in prospect as IHT on pensions arrives. We should be finding a way to improve the system—for example, by widening the application of IHT423. I will focus on Amendment 94 on financial education. This is an issue on which I have campaigned for a long time. It reflects my belief that financial capability is an essential life skill and, indeed, that it is essential if we are to have financial inclusion for those struggling to make ends meet. I will not repeat the strong case I made in Committee on 8 July which can be found in Hansard at column 149. Our revised amendment would require the FCA to take reasonable steps to work with the Money and Pensions Service, the Secretary of State for Education, relevant education bodies, providers of teacher training and professional development and industry bodies to support the effective delivery of financial education. It is good that I now have the support of the noble Baroness, Lady Kramer. The financial decisions that people are expected to make are increasingly complex. Young people, as well as adults of all ages, need a working understanding of concepts such as compound interest, inflation, pensions, savings, taxation, borrowing and so on. My noble friend Lord Agnew was on the BBC this weekend. He has written about how 10 million adults in Britain right now have the numeracy of a primary school child, yet we are asking young people to make extremely significant financial decision—sometimes taking on tens of thousands of pounds of student debt—without necessarily giving them the grounding in financial concepts that would allow them to understand those decisions. I was very grateful to the Minister for helping to arrange a meeting with the Money and Pensions Service. I recognise the work that it is doing. However, one concern I took away from that meeting was that a considerable amount of financial guidance focuses on moments when an individual has reached a major financial event, such as taking out a mortgage, dealing with a divorce, approaching retirement or experiencing financial difficulty. I believe we need to be more ambitious. Our objective should be to build financial capability throughout the population before people reach these moments and, indeed, to encourage sound investment and savings for a rainy day.