How we're helping disabled teens access their Child Trust Funds

Ryan is 12 and severely autistic; his vulnerability is obvious, and yet the state has a nasty shock in store for him when he's 18 instead of getting access to his child trust fund.

Like millions of others, Ryan will be excluded from his own savings, leaving his mum with a major court battle.

It's an injustice, it really is, because why should we have to go through all these hoops when a family with a typically developing child can just access their money, no problem. You know it's not fair on us. We haven't got that money. We haven't got that time; we are exhausted, and we need help.

Up to 150,000 other families each year are now becoming deprived of their money because their children lack mental capacity, locked out by a legal loophole the laws designed to stop vulnerable people being exploited, but this very protection in practice deprives them of what is theirs.

People are just giving up. I think what we've seen over the last five months is that there should have been something like 5000 accounts created for children who are vulnerable, but actually, we've seen only 50 have been applied for by parents.

If one in four families do not access the funds, the overall result of that could be that there is something like a hundred million pounds which would be lost to these children.

We've come to Fife, Gordon Brown Country, and for the first time, the architect of child trust funds, which have helped millions of families, speaks exclusively to Channel 4 News, demanding action.

He's writing to the children's commissioner to end this and says the chancellor must act. I hope the chancellor will actually do this in the budget at the beginning of March so we can give some satisfaction and some comfort to those parents who know, and there are thousands of them who know that their children will be unable to claim the money themselves.

Perhaps it's the Department of Justice, perhaps it's the Treasury, but they should knock their heads together and get this done immediately. That message from fife will reverberate cross-party support is building questions in the House of Lords tomorrow demanding action.

"Discrimination" is the right word in this case when an able-bodied young person can access their own funds immediately without any problem and a disabled young person has to go to court to be informed.

I'm glad they got rid of the fee, but they still don't understand the delays involved. That is discrimination, and the government have got to pull their finger out; they've been far too slow on this.

Last year, the government did make minor changes, abolishing some court fees; it's setting up a working party, but the task Maria will face to get Ryan his own cash is still daunting.

In September, a justice minister wrote to one frustrated parent saying, applications to the court are relatively straightforward and may be made without legal representation. This is a relatively straightforward process: not one form, not two, not half a dozen, but ten forms dripping with jargon.

In total, 54 pages, some have to be in duplicate. You have to do it by hand, not online, make a mistake, they'll reject it and send it back to you. You might think that's it, but you'd be wrong because you then have to ask your GP or social worker, currently rather busy with the pandemic, to fill out another 10 page form.

Some doctors charge several hundred pounds for this, and then there's a wait of at least five months and all this to get money for our most vulnerable people, which is already theirs. In fact, the people who have been denied it are the people who need that money most.

Last August, we reported how Mikey, at 18, wanted to spend his fund money on a bike. It looked impossible without a long court battle, but then his fund administrators just tore up the red tape and paid up.

Oh Mikey that's amazing; Mikey's in the saddle, and now a leading trust fund provider, OneFamily, says it's doing the same.

It's good to know that the team at OneFamily are here to help you make the most of your money. They just ask parents for proof of the mental incapacity of their child, proof they're legal guardians, no court, no stress, no problem, they pay out.

If we can do that, then we dispense with the need to go through the court process, particularly where the value of the case is quite small. In some cases, it seems extraordinarily easy; yes, I think it can be, and a lot of the proof already exists. In many cases, we proposed two solutions: one is a minor change in the law, which wouldn't take very long, and the other is working with the fund providers to enable the parent carers to access these funds with just a few simple tests.

Both of these work we've checked them with specialist lawyers, and I don't know why the government won't adopt these ideas. It's just a tweak in the law or allowing fund providers to act, and that'll unlock tens of millions for our Mikey's and our Ryan's.