Dormant Bank and Building Society Accounts Bill [HL]

While the noble Baroness thinks about the hierarchy, I have a further couple of comments to make. If we were to go down the route that she proposed on the pensions protection lifeboat fund it would be logical for this amendment to be carried, because you would be pretty crazy to expect the Lottery fund to get involved in all that. However, if we are not going down that route the argument seems to be much less clear. As the noble Baroness said, it would be possible for the Government to specify UK-wide causes for this money to be spent on. It would also be possible to expand that to cover completely different fields—and the noble Baroness mentioned the Armed Forces. It seems that whatever amount of money is to be available from this fund—no doubt it will be between the lower and upper estimates that have been made—the causes to which the fund will be directed are perfectly capable of absorbing virtually any amount of money that one could conceivably imagine the reclaim fund could attract. Therefore, potentially to expand the scope in the way proposed by the noble Baroness beyond even the lifeboat fund runs the risk of a serious lack of focus. I do not doubt that one could propose many national programmes. The Armed Forces need additional resources but the same applies to the health service and to every aspect of public expenditure. The Bill must plump for a definition and a series of containable and manageable programmes. I am not saying that it is absolutely perfect, but our broad view is that the way in which the Government are planning to spend the money makes sense. If you start dissipating it across a whole raft of other things you will lose focus, and that would be detrimental to the whole scheme, not least in the public’s perception of how the dormant assets are being used. For that reason, and the reason given by the noble Lord, Lord Shutt, we are unable to support the amendments.