Charles supports the Bill as a step towards rebuilding a savings culture in this country and calls on banks to demonstrate their much trumpeted corporate social responsibility by offering the Saving Gateway accounts.

Mr. Walker: The Bill is a small step towards ensuring that this country rediscovers the savings culture. Our long-term prosperity will be built not on spend now, worry about it tomorrow but on savings and investment for the future. This is a small but important step.

We must drive discipline through the income scale. The Bill is about low earners, but the savings culture is relevant to everyone, wherever on the scale they appear, because they all have costly needs and demands. When people lose their job, it does not matter whether they are earning £10,000 or £100,000, they find themselves in difficulties. We must ensure that in future, people put some money aside for a rainy day.

We must remember that although the current financial crisis was not caused by people on low incomes, they are too often paying the price. Credit is drying up at their end of the scale as well, and they are struggling even more to gain affordable credit. As a result, they are being forced deeper into the arms of loan sharks charging exorbitant rates. We talk about putting things on the never-never, but as we know, as soon as someone misses a payment to loan sharks, they are on the doorstep making their life extremely difficult and miserable.

I need to be able to sell the Bill in Broxbourne, because it will be relevant to many of my constituents. I hope that the Minister and his civil servants will put together a pack of information leaflets, brochures and so on so that I can play my part in selling it to my constituents and getting the citizens advice bureau involved. I want to play an active part in giving it the push that it deserves.

I congratulate the Minister on all his work on the Bill. I hope that when he gets back to his office this afternoon the phone will be ringing off the hook, with all the chastened chief executives of major clearing banks calling him up and demanding the chance to deliver this initiative as soon as it comes into being next year. It has been a great pleasure to serve on the Public Bill Committee and to participate in the Bill’s various parliamentary stages. I wish it the best of luck.

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Mr. Walker: We are approaching a new age of financial responsibility as a result of the current downturn in the financial markets, and we will see a separation of banking services. Investment banks will become separate from retail banks, which will, in their purest form, have to get used to much smaller profit margins. So the traditional reasons for not entering the markets that are the subject of the Bill will eventually disappear.

All banks publish voluminous annual reports, and at the back they include corporate social responsibility statements. There is no better way for the banks to demonstrate their corporate social responsibility than by seizing this initiative and driving it through their branch network. At the moment, banks are rightly held in very low esteem by the vast majority of people and banks need to make some headway in the community. Traditionally, banks have ignored low income groups in favour of chasing those people whom they deem to be more profitable—those who can take out significant mortgages or rack up large credit card debts.

I do not want to see any financial sector excluded from delivering these accounts. I sincerely hope that the Post Office is involved in their delivery, because for many people the post office is their local shop and at the centre of their community. I also hope that credit unions play their part in delivering these accounts, but the credit union sector is still small—although it is growing—and many communities will not have a local credit union over the next decade or so. So banks will have an important role to play in delivering these accounts.

I am sure that when the whiz kids in the banks sit down and look at the accounts they will conclude that they will not make a lot of money out of them. Indeed, banks might make a small loss in delivering the accounts. However, that should not deter them. We have heard many declarations of contrition for the banks’ failures in the past year and the failures that undoubtedly lie ahead, but if they are to restore confidence, the provision of these accounts would be a good place to start. I hope that banks will seize the opportunity to volunteer to be at the forefront of this initiative, instead of being dragged to do so.

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EARLIER INTERVENTION IN THE SAME DEBATE

Mr. Charles Walker (Broxbourne) (Con): As most banks are now in receipt of public money, it would not be impossible for the Government to apply some pressure to make the effort to deliver on this scheme.

Mr. Hoban: My hon. Friend makes an interesting point. Apparently, these banks are managed on an arm’s length basis, but it appears from press comments about the assets insurance scheme that strings are being attached to the receipt of such support. The Minister might like to think about my hon. Friend’s suggestion and attach a further string. Participation in a saving gateway account scheme might be a reasonable concession in return for the receipt of protection of apparently £500 billion—indeed, it would be a small price for banks to pay. The Minister might like to discuss with his colleagues in the Treasury and the Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform whether this is a feasible concession for the banks to make and whether the Government will press for it.