Dormant Bank and Building Society Accounts Bill [HL]

No. Normally when the press is speculating on clashes within government, from my perspective I am all too well aware that it is often singularly ill-informed. That is why I used the phrase there. It cannot be an intelligent strategy to divert to the lifeboat fund the dormant account money. It would be an open-ended commitment. We do not know how much money would be involved nor how long the undertaking would be. So we would be building into these accounts and the structures of the Bill a long-running commitment which we would not be able to calculate and the end of which we could not foresee; we would not know when the obligation was fulfilled. I have not the slightest doubt that in other areas of the Bill—I have already had some experience of this today—the Opposition are only too keen to identify how precise we need to be with certain calculations. Here we have a grandiose scheme which is utterly open-ended. We have set out our key priorities for the dormant account money, we have discussed with the institutions the structure of a light-touch regime to which they broadly give their support and, of course, we have our priorities within it. The noble Lord, Lord Newby, emphasised that the issue should be dealt with elsewhere and the noble Lord, Lord Higgins, although he supports the amendment, also thought that the resolution of the pensions issues lies in other funding structures. The Government are extremely busy about meeting those needs, and it will be appreciated that the reason why there is considerable press comment at present is because of the degree of hard work going on to see how issues with regard to those suffering losses can be remedied. That is all against a background of the review of the financial assistance scheme taking place under Andrew Young to find out what better use can be made of the residual assets in the pensions scheme, and we expect that report in the near future. Mike O’Brien, the Minister, committed during the passage of the Pensions Bill to match the extra funds that the review identifies with the goal of moving towards 90 per cent of expected core pension for all recipients. That was not a lightly entered-into commitment. We all recognise how difficult it is to fulfil, which is why the issue lies in where the resources will come from. But of course we are taking action on this important issue. I do not underestimate the noble Baroness’s opportunistic skill in identifying the issue—