Contact urges Government to include disabled young people in Child Trust Fund plans 

2 mins read

Tuesday 21 January 2025

Tags: Parent Carers, learning disability, mental capacity, child trust funds, Disabled young people


The Chair of the Public Accounts Committee, Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown MP, is backing calls for automatic payments of unclaimed Child Trust Funds (CTFs) if they haven’t been claimed by the account holder’s 21st birthday.  

Contact supports the goal of ensuring that savings held in CTFs reach their rightful owners – this must include savers without the mental capacity to manage their own finances. 

Continued injustice

Maria Scholey, Contact’s Policy lead on Child Trust Funds, said: “We welcome Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown MP shining a spotlight on the issue of unclaimed Child Trust Funds. There is a lot of work to be done in making young people aware they have money sitting in these funds that could be of great benefit. 

“Sadly for young disabled people who lack mental capacity they are not only faced with this barrier. They are also required to apply through an overly complicated process to access their money. The previous government failed to take the action needed to bring an end to this continued injustice. We are now urging Labour to look at the solutions that we have presented (for example extending the appointee scheme or adopting the industry process already in use by several providers) and to resolve this issue once and for all. The future of young disabled people matters. Their savings must too.”

Parent led campaign

Over 80,000 disabled young people are currently at risk of being locked out of £210million of their own savings, due to the difficult and often costly, process required to access them. Contact are proud supporters of a parent led campaign run by Andrew Turner, which is asking the government to resolve this. 

Child Trust Funds were designed to help incentivise parents to save for their child’s future. Unfortunately, in what has since been described as a ‘mistake’, no provision was made for if the child did not have capacity to manage their own money at 18.  

Andrew Turner has campaigned with Contact’s full support for many years to find a solution that protects the rights of disabled young people, whilst not placing unnecessary extra burden on their loving and caring families.