Dormant Bank and Building Society Accounts Bill [HL]

I rise to support the noble Baroness. In relation to Amendment No. 13, I do not think that any of us has had a chance to check with every building society. However, it is conceivable that there will be a small building society that does not want to take on the job of dealing with its lost or closed accounts but will prefer to hand it over to the Big Lottery Fund because the administration involved will be just too much for it. Therefore, I think that that option should be kept open. The key point, if I may say so, is that the Minister needs to understand the difference between the building society movement and high street banks. The difference is one of mutuality. My noble friend on the Front Bench tends to wince when I talk about mutuality but that is the fundamental difference. The members of a building society own the building society and the whole thrust of the organisation is to meet the members’ needs. There are no shareholders, no outside bodies can hold influence and the building society cannot be taken over, so it is a very different animal. Therefore, the threshold of £7 billion is wrong and unrealistic. Ultimately, the members will benefit and in many cases they have already set up charities within the building society. The Minister talks about a light touch. At the moment, control over where the money goes lies with the Charity Commission and, frankly, no one else has to get involved. The Charity Commission is charged with looking at whether the trustees of a charity are appropriate persons. One has only to look at the breadth of experience of the Nationwide’s trustees to see that they are. I asked the Nationwide, as I was able to get hold of it quickly, what sort of awards are given. An awful lot of them are around £5,000 and they are all over the place; for example, £5,000 for the Newtownabbey CAB and £3,737 for North Wales Victim Support. Also listed is the Benefit Advice Shop in Rhyl, Wales—and the list goes on and on. Why are the awards so small and why are they so regionalised? It is, as the noble Lord said at the beginning, because they basically started from the co-operative movement and they have a footprint in the local community which they have developed, in some cases, over centuries. It irks a building society to hear that money that has lain in a dormant account will be transferred to the Big Lottery Fund, over which it has absolutely no influence. The members do not want that and I think that the Government should listen to them. The key point is that there is a big difference between a mutual society and a mainstream, high street bank. The amount of money involved is substantial: I think that the figure of £22 million has already been mentioned in relation to one society over the past 10 years. We should also look at the quality of what has been done. Who won the Charity Awards 2006? It was a building society—the Nationwide. I repeat that there are good, solid trustee boards. If the Government really believe in a light-touch framework, they will recognise that the mutual movement is different from the joint stock bank movement. There is already a track record there and there should not be a differentiation of an arbitrary figure of £7 billion.