Child Trust Funds: How to track down your part of unclaimed £950m - Sarah Coles

If you, or friends or family, have children born between 1 September 2002 and 1 January 2011, you can help them track down their forgotten cash. And don’t stop there, because lost windfalls come in all sorts of shapes and sizes. There’s billions of pounds available, and some of it could belong to you.

The Child Trust Fund (CTF) system worked by giving parents a voucher worth £250 (or £500 for those from lower income families), to put into a CTF for their child. If they didn’t get round to making a choice, HMRC picked one for them. The money is tied up until the child reaches the age of 18, and then matures and belongs entirely to the young adult, who can withdraw or transfer it.

It's relatively straightforward to track a CTF down. If you picked your own, or topped it up, start by checking if you have any paperwork, so you can get in touch with the company running the account. However, if you were one of the 1.8 million who had a CTF opened by HMRC, and never really knew where the money went, don’t worry, because you still can find it. As long you’re either a young adult with a CFT in your name, or you have parental responsibility for a child who qualified for one, you can sign into the Government Gateway, or sign up for an account, fill out a form, and they will let you know where your CTF is.

However, this is far from the only windfall that we’ve lost track of over the years, so don’t stop there.

One of the biggest chunks of lost cash is in pensions. When the FCA looked into it in 2021, it estimated there was an astonishing £2.1 billion lost in pensions and insurance policies. This is partly due to the fact that we hold them for such a long time that there’s a decent chance we move house and forget to update our details. Now that so many people are automatically enrolled into a pension scheme at work, it means that every time you move jobs, you get another pension – and when you have so many, it becomes much easier to lose track.

With workplace pensions, you’ll need the name of the employer or the scheme, plus the dates you worked there. If you can’t find your paperwork, it may be worth tracking down old colleagues to see whether they have any information: LinkedIn can be very useful for this. Once you have this, call your old employer and ask for details of the administrator or the pension company.

For personal pensions, try to dig out any old paperwork. If you don’t have the pension statements themselves, you might be able to find details on old bank statements from when you were making contributions. If you draw a blank – with any kind of pension – you can try the government’s Pension Tracing Service (https://www.gov.uk/find-pension-contact-details). It will search 200,000 schemes and supply contact details of companies you have a pension with. You can then call the company concerned and get them to unearth your forgotten cash.

It’s also worth considering whether you have any savings or current accounts you may have mislaid. There’s apparently £1.35 billion in accounts that haven’t been touched for 15 years – so the total size of the sums that have slipped people’s minds is likely to be far bigger. If you can dredge up a memory of the bank where you held your money, it makes the process easier, because you can contact them and once you’ve proved who you are, they can help you find your cash. However, even if you can’t remember where your savings are, there are still things you can do.

There’s a handy service called My Lost Account (My Lost Account), which lets you select all the banks and building societies you think could conceivably hold your money, and it will search to see if you have an account. If you do, it will send you contact details and you can get in touch. This is useful not just for savings, but investments too – where there’s thought to be about £1.4 billion languishing. It will also check NS&I, to see if you have any lost savings or unclaimed Premium Bond prizes.

Once you’ve found any lost windfalls, it’s worth considering taking steps to make it more difficult to lose track again. You may want to consolidate old savings, current accounts and investments. You might also want to bring your pensions together. However, you need to check whether there are any onerous charges for making a switch or any valuable guarantees attached to any of them. If you have a defined benefit pension, or a defined contribution pension with a guaranteed annuity rate, for example, you may not want to give them up.

It's also worth producing a list of all the accounts you hold, which will come in handy any time you move house, so you don’t forget to update any of them. It’s a sensible ‘belt and braces’ step to have your post forwarded for a full year too, so that even if a company only contacts you once a year, you get a nudge that you need to tell them your new address.

It can be a fairly time-consuming project, but given that the average lost CTF is worth £2,000, and the average forgotten pension pot holds £9,000, it could be a rewarding one. Who knows, there could be a million-pound Premium Bond win with your name on it too…

Early signs of property wobble

Figures out this week from Zoopla showed that 42 per cent of house sellers are accepting offers more than 5 per cent below the asking price – the highest number in five years. Meanwhile 15 per cent are accepting offers 10% lower than asking, and the average discount has hit 3.8 per cent.

Overall house prices are up 1.2 per cent in a year, and Yorkshire is faring better than most of the country. In the Zoopla league table of cities, Leeds and Sheffield have seen the fourth and fifth biggest growth over the past year (both at 3.4 per cent). Meanwhile, overall prices in Yorkshire and the Humber are still up 3 per cent in a year – which is the third strongest growth – after Wales and the West Midlands.

However, annual house prices are set to turn negative in the second half of the year – with a 5 per cent fall across the UK by the end of 2023.

Part of the problem is that we’ve seen another drop in the number of buyers and a rise in sellers, and this was before recent mortgage rate hikes fed through into the market. When the impact of mortgage rate hikes is felt, we can expect this to intensify. A rise from 4 per cent to 6 per cent cuts buying power by 20 per cent, which is going to take a toll.

It's also worth keeping an eye on the number of properties being put up for sale. Supply is starting to grow faster, and 18 per cent more homes hit the market in the previous four weeks than the five-year average. As borrowers face the horror of remortgaging at a much higher rate, they’re weighing up their options, and there’s a risk of more forced sales – which could hit house prices hard.