Dormant Bank and Building Society Accounts Bill [HL]

We have considerable sympathy with the noble Baroness to the extent that the pension protection lifeboat fund is a worthy aim. In our view, it is a sufficient priority that it should be dealt with straightforwardly by the Treasury. I congratulate the noble Baroness on having come up with this alternative route to deal with the problem, but I have some slight difficulties with it. They relate to how thinly we spread any resources that are available under this fund. There are already considerable doubts about whether enough resources will be available to fulfil the third of the three objectives set out for the reclaim fund in respect of the social investment bank. My immediate view is that, unless there is considerably more money available than we have been led to believe, adding a fourth limb to the spending streams—if you can add a limb to a stream—would dilute (which you can do to a stream) the purposes. It also opens up the project to further amendments. I have colleagues who feel strongly that some or all of this money should be going to support international development goals. Indeed, at one point it may well have been Liberal Democrat policy that we should do so. There are no end of positive, useful things to do with the money. To go back to the discussions that we had earlier, if we were extending the scope of the scheme to include the dormant assets of insurance companies and pension funds, the logic for some of the funding going in this direction would be stronger. However, we are clearly not going in that direction in the foreseeable future. Within the scope of the scheme as it is likely to emerge from the Bill, because of the ““spreading thin”” argument we are not minded to support these amendments.