£1.6 billion in savings left unclaimed – are you among the hundreds of thousands unknowingly missing out?

Hundreds of thousands of young people have more than £2,000 sitting unclaimed in Child Trust Funds (CTFs), a type of tax-free savings account for children born between 2002 and 2011.

The government has now launched a taskforce aimed at reuniting people with their money, with ministers teaming up with financial institutions including Nationwide, HSBC and Sheffield Mutual to reconnect savers with their accounts.

Roughly 6.3 million CTFs were opened for children born between 1 September 2002 and 2 January 2011, mostly by parents and guardians but some by HMRC.

The tax-free funds could be opened as cash savings or stocks and shares accounts.

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These accounts started maturing in 2020, but due to a number of reasons including difficulty tracing them, people forgetting they have them or deciding to leave the funds invested, more than 750,000 matured accounts still remain unclaimed.

Once a CTF matures, you can no longer add money into it and it is typically moved into a default account paying a weak interest rate.

Rachel Blake, economic secretary to the Treasury, said: “Too many young people are missing out simply because they are not aware of where their Child Trust Fund is or how to access it.

“We are acting to fix that by bringing government and industry together – improving coordination and making it easier for people to find and claim what’s rightfully theirs.”

HM Treasury said the taskforce will “improve tracing approaches, test more effective engagement with young people, and drive practical actions that lead to more accounts being claimed”.

Its launch comes after HMRC wrote letters to thousands of 21-year-olds reminding them to claim the money in their CTFs in April.

HMRC is reminding eligible young people they can claim the funds through online campaigns on social media platforms like X, formerly Twitter.

Antonia Medlicott, founder and managing director at personal finance website Investing Insiders, welcomed the government’s taskforce but said more should have been done sooner.

She added: “Far too many Child Trust Funds are going unclaimed. Some accounts will hold significantly more than the £2,200 average figure that has been circulated, and it’s a shame to see that they have been left until now.”

How to track down lost Child Trust Funds

In the first instance, you should contact the provider the CTF was set up with, who should be able to reunite you with the account.

Alternatively, you can use HMRC’s Child Trust Fund tool to request your CTF details if you’re over 16. Make sure you’ve got your National Insurance number to hand.

You can also use this tool if you’re a parent or guardian of a child under 18. You will need the child’s full name, address and date of birth, and also any previous names you or the child have used.

You may have a CTF under your name even if you or your parents didn’t set one up for you. If an account wasn’t set up for an eligible child after 12 months, HMRC opened one on the parents’ behalf.

Sarah Coles, head of personal finance at investment platform AJ Bell, said: “Of the 6.3 million accounts that were opened, 1.8 million were opened by HMRC, so there’s a decent chance the parents of these children never engaged with where the money ended up.

“For those who did choose where to put the money, so much time has passed that there’s a real risk they moved house and didn’t update their details, and if the paperwork has gone astray, they may have forgotten these accounts entirely.”

What should you do once you’ve tracked down the Child Trust Fund?

Unless you need all the money from the CTF for an emergency, it could be worth keeping some of it invested to grow.

However, it might be worth transferring the remaining funds from the CTF into a Junior ISA.

Coles explained: “Stocks and Shares CTFs tend to have higher charges and less choice than their equivalent Junior ISAs, while Cash CTFs often pay less interest. It means parents should waste no time in tracking the accounts down and deciding whether to move the money into a Junior ISA.”