COVID-19 and the Child Trust Fund

Rajiv Prabhakar, Senior Lecturer in Personal Finance, writes for Renewal: A journal of social democracy. 

Young people are likely to bear much of the economic fall-out from COVID-19. There is a case of targeting special help for young people. From September 2020, the first generation of Child Trust Funds begin to mature. One practical challenge to using Child Trust Funds to channel emergency payments are the presence of dormant accounts. But an infrastructure of accounts for young people exists and the UK government also provides help in finding ‘lost’ accounts. A reborn Child Trust Fund would revisit earlier conceptions of it as a capital grant and it could contribute to bottom-up models of social democracy.