‘It’s ridiculous’: the teens struggling to access NatWest child trust funds

theguardian.com:

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