Dormant Bank and Building Society Accounts Bill [HL]

moved Amendment No. 1: 1: Clause 1, page 1, line 4, at end insert— ““( ) This section and section 2 are subject to section (Report on operation of schemes in sections 1 and 2).”” The noble Baroness said: In moving Amendment No. 1, I shall also speak to Amendment No. 15 and to Amendment No. 16 in the name of the Liberal Democrats. As we begin this Committee stage, I should like to set out our broad approach to the scrutiny of the Bill. Our overall view is that the Bill is excessively narrow and needs to be widened in a number of ways, both as to the assets that could be brought within its scope and the purposes to which money could be put. Those will be our main subjects for debate, but we also have a number of detailed amendments designed to tease out the finer points of detail on parts of the Bill, on which we all want to work constructively to improve it. We start today with one of our larger themes—the range of assets within the scope of the Bill. We had hoped to table amendments specifically aimed at bringing in other forms of dormant financial asset to the Bill. The list is potentially very long, including life assurance policies, pension assets, shares not taken up in demutualisations, other shares whose owners cannot be traced, and so on. The values are potentially at least as significant as those involved in the dormant bank and building society accounts covered by this Bill. I tried very hard to persuade the Public Bill Office to allow me to table an amendment that would have created an order-making power for the Treasury to bring other categories of dormant financial asset into the overall scope of the Bill at a later stage. The broad scheme of transferring funds but preserving the owner’s rights to reclaim those funds provides a good umbrella that could cover many other kinds of asset—and we hoped to be able to amend the Bill to that effect. We recognise that there are many legal and technical complexities involved in the other categories of assets, which is why we wanted to create a fairly extensive order-making power. The Minister will know that such an amendment would have had support from all sides of the Committee. However, he can breathe a sigh of relief because the Public Bill Office was adamant that the scope could not be extended beyond the financial assets similar in nature to bank and building society accounts. Hence my noble friend Lord Higgins was allowed to table Amendment No. 31 in respect of national savings, to which we shall come later, but I could not table anything broader. I believe that the Liberal Democrats hit a similar Public Bill Office roadblock on this issue. I mean no criticism of the Public Bill Office, which was as usual entirely helpful, but it has its rules to follow and it follows them—and the Opposition have to accept its judgments even though we do not agree with them. Amendments Nos. 1 and 15 are second-best amendments. Since we cannot extend the Bill to other forms of asset, we have instead, and with the help of the Public Bill Office, inserted a new clause after Clause 2 which requires the Secretary of State to report on the operation of the scheme set up under Clauses 1 and 2. Importantly, subsection (2) of the proposed new clause says: "““The report shall… consider the desirability of establishing similar schemes in respect of other providers of financial services””." That will not of itself create new schemes for gathering in dormant financial assets, but it will ensure that such schemes will not disappear from public view. The amendment calls for the report within 12 months of the coming into force of Part 1 of the Bill. On reflection, however, that period must be too short and I shall reconsider it when we return to the issue on Report. Amendment No. 16, tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Shutt, extends the report to ““other orphan assets””. I am not clear what the terminology ““orphan asset”” actually means but I see that the sense of the report should extend to other categories of asset such as shares whose owners cannot be traced rather than simply focusing on those found in financial services businesses. Perhaps the Liberal Democrats and we can work on a better amendment before we return to this matter at Report. The Government in their consultation on this scheme did not ask for views on whether the scope of assets within the scheme was right. Nevertheless, they got those views. According to the Government’s summary of responses in the document that they issued in November, around 60 per cent of respondents wanted the scheme to cover other assets. That was the response to a question that had not been asked. It is not only organisations in the third sector that wanted this; some financial institutions also wanted it. The Government will have their way, and ignore that strong support for a wider scope to the Bill, because we will not oppose the Bill and thereby delay the scheme for bank and building society accounts. However, we do not believe that the Government should get away with ignoring the issue, which is why the amendment is designed to keep the public focused on those other categories of assets. I beg to move.