Comment by Liam Byrne

In time, a national fund worth around £100 billion would be enough to pay out to every young person at the age of 21, a one-off dividend of around £4,000 which could be used, in effect, as an individual learning account to help pay for retraining should and when the need arise. But we could widen the potential uses of this fund to include a deposit to buy a house. As the fund builds and the dividends rise, it could well become the foundation for a system of Universal Basic Capital and a cornerstone for a new wealth-owning democracy for the 21st century.