‘There is overwhelming evidence that UK government policies and our economy are extremely intergenerationally unfair.’

 UK Parliament Select Committee on Work and Pensions

The massed ranks of Government MPs waving their order papers when Chancellor Rachel Reeves announced the abolition of the 2-child welfare benefit cap might have given the impression that they were welcoming a new strategy for tackling poverty amongst children and young people.

A Child Poverty Task Force led by Liz Kendall, then Minister at the Department for Work and Pensions, and Bridget Phillipson, Minister at the Department for Education, was set up to report last June. This was delayed until the autumn, but to date its only outcome has been this welfare cap abolition. Whether its abolition actually does take 400,000 children out of poverty, as the Prime Minister claims, is a moot point; but this policy announcement is more about placating restless Labour MPs than reforming the strategy for tackling poverty for children and young people generally.

So this week we focus on three areas with a substantial impact on the well-being of children and young people which have received no attention in the Budget:

  • The 1.7 million young people who were allocated Child Trust Fund accounts by the Inland Revenue under the previous Labour government, 51% of whom are ‘low income’ but who were never properly informed about their funds — these are now worth up to £3,000 each, and remain substantially unknown and unclaimed;
  • The punishing burden caused by student loan repayment terms, with cripplingly high interest rates and frozen thresholds at which repayment must start; and
  • The immense strain on the child care and adoption system which was highlighted by the BBC last week, resulting from familial breakdown and social instability. This can be tracked down to both migration and the fact that more than half of all children being born out of wedlock — so it's not hard to see how this alone may result in 400,000 children being in poverty.

While young people suffer, we still hang onto the triple-lock system for pensions and the outdated welfare system of Attleean universality which results in free healthcare costs primarily benefiting older people, who are also the wealthiest generation. Another quote from the DWP Select Committee read, ‘The economy has become skewed in favour of baby boomers and against millennials’.

There is no inter-generational strategy here; there hasn't been for the past fifteen years. The Conservatives and Liberal Democrats were primarily responsible for the massive burden of student debt. The current Labour administration is responsible for the failure to deliver Gordon Brown and Ruth Kelly's ground-breaking Child Trust Fund scheme to the young people who need it the most. And we are all responsible for the insecurity and instability which result in so many young people having to suffer throughout their adolescence.

Let's take a more detailed look at Child Trust Fund delivery. In 2018, when I was still running The Share Centre, I analysed the 83,000 HMRC-allocated accounts under our administration: I discovered that over 86% had either never been registered by the family, or that postal returns had shown that they were ‘Addressee Gone Away’. That's why The Share Foundation established its https://findCTF.sharefound.org search facility, which has already linked over 100,000 accounts with their owners: accounts with a total value of nearly £¼ billion.

For the past two years, The Share Foundation has been asking Government to introduce an ‘Automatic Release’ system for HMRC-allocated CTF accounts so that the money does reach the young adults who really need it: using benefits, payroll and student loan channels. This proposal has been repeatedly denied by both Conservative and Labour administrations, most recently following last week’s Budget.

Not only this, but HMRC cannot even provide statistics for how many HMRC-allocated accounts remain unclaimed: here is a Parliamentary answer delivered last week to a question asking for this information, and to another question asking them to disclose the number of these accounts which have been ‘squirrelled away’ by fee-receiving account administrators using an automatic transfer process to convert them into Individual Savings Accounts. These transferred accounts are not included in the HMRC’s September press release, which still stated that the overall number of unclaimed CTF accounts is 758,000:

‘25 November 2025

 Information on Child Trust Funds is available in HMRC’s Annual Savings Statistics.

https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/annual-savings-statistics-2025(opens in a new tab)

We cannot answer each element of the 2 questions as HMRC does not receive a breakdown of unclaimed matured Child Trust Fund accounts from providers. This means we can’t identify which CTFs have been HMRC allocated and transferred into ISAs, nor break down the figures shared in the press release on the 30th September.’

It's hard to understand how the HMRC can admit to being so unaware of the unclaimed status of this segment of Child Trust Funds which is so important for disadvantaged young people, and for which they were solely responsible for opening. However, The Share Foundation estimates that nearly half a million of these HMRC-allocated accounts remain unknown and unclaimed by their owners, and that two-thirds of their value belongs to ‘low-income’ young adults.

Meanwhile, those young people who succeed in getting to university are saddled with huge levels of student debt, averaging £53,000 per graduate. Those who listened to BBC Question Time last week will also have heard how unfair it is to apply an interest rate of 6.2% to this debt, and to insist on repayment based on a threshold which has been frozen at just £25,000 income per annum.

This technique of freezing thresholds, originally introduced by the Conservatives, is now pushing huge numbers of average wage earners into high rates of tax in order to fund Labour's addiction to Attleean universality for free welfare, healthcare and education.

Young people do not deserve to be treated like fodder for this outdated socialist mantra of universality which should have been set aside decades ago, as we commented on 10th November. If we don't build a proper, coherent strategy for young people, they will, if they are able, simply vote with their feet and leave the country in increasing numbers. The net migration figure announced last week failed to mention the average age of emigrants from the United Kingdom, and the steady outflow of young people looking for the opportunity to achieve their potential elsewhere.

We need a new focus on young people, and it's much more than lowering the voting age to 16. We also need to build a new sense of morality and family responsibility: the laws relating to family breakdown place very little additional responsibility where children are involved, while the laissez-faire approach which has resulted in so many one-parent families has resulted in huge numbers of ‘lost boys’ being without a father present in their home as a role model — and so much insecurity generally.

Sir Keir Starmer repeats his passion for resolving child poverty often, but it calls for so much more than abolishing the two-child benefit cap. He has referred to Alan Milburn helping to chart a better way forward, but will he be able to deliver it where everyone else is failing? Time will tell.

Gavin Oldham OBE

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