‘It’s ridiculous’: the teens struggling to access NatWest child trust funds
Teenagers with child trust funds at NatWest are waiting months to get hold of cash in matured accounts.
Those affected include Joshua Burdon, whose child trust fund (CTF) with £3,500 in it matured when he turned 18 more than a year ago.
He was planning to use the money to buy a car, but is still waiting for NatWest to transfer the cash, and says he ended up having to use his own money and borrow from a family member in order to finance the purchase.
Burdon is not alone in facing a struggle to get his CTF money out of the partially state-owned bank. NatWest is not short of cash – it made profits of £1.2bn in the first three months of this year – but it has been struggling to deal with a deluge of people wanting to redeem their CTF accounts.
Guardian Money has also been contacted by a woman who says her 18-year-old daughter has been waiting months for her money, and there are a number of recent complaints along similar lines on the Review Centre website and on the MoneySavingExpert forum, as well as on Twitter and Facebook.
CTFs – nicknamed “baby bonds” – are long-term tax-free accounts for children that were launched in 2005. More than 6.3m were opened before they were scrapped in 2011.
Every child born between 1 September 2002 and 2 January 2011 was awarded a cash “endowment” of, typically, £250. Some children received top-up payments from the government, and family and friends have been able to pay money in, too.
In autumn 2020 the first CTF children began turning 18, kicking off a multibillion-pound payout that will run all the way through until early 2029.
It is estimated that each month about 55,000 teenagers – about 1,800 a day – turn 18 and become entitled to a pot of cash with their name on it.
NatWest is one of the
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