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Here is the good news: 390,000 Child Trust Fund
accounts have been opened in the past three months, taking the total to
nearly 900,000. Someone called Ivan Lewis, one of the ministers at the
Treasury, describes this as "tremendous".

He’s
frightfully pleased with this "excellent progress" towards helping to
achieve his master’s goal of every child getting the best start in
life. Mr Lewis would rather not draw attention to the fact that 1.9m
vouchers have been issued, lest the implications of this farcical
scheme begin to sink in.

It seems that the
government machine in which he is a rather modest cog cannot even give
money away. More than half of those vouchers, despatched months ago
with such fanfare, have yet to be presented, and the suspicion is
growing that hundreds of thousands of them have simply been binned,
perhaps by recipients operating on the perfectly understandable thesis
that no good news ever arrives in an official envelope, whatever it may
say on the cover.

So desperate have Mr Lewis’s
colleagues become that they have spent £5.6m advertising this free
money, although when they followed up with a survey, they found that
more than one in three of the intended target audience hadn’t seen the
ads, so even spending money to promote free money doesn’t seem to do
the trick.