Dormant Bank and Building Society Accounts Bill [HL]

My noble friend has obviously spent a great deal of time drafting this complex amendment. I have to say that I have considerable misgivings about it. Yesterday I moved amendments suggesting that the best way of finding the owners of dormant accounts would be to publish their names. That is likely to be far more fruitful than other means. It is true, of course, that the banks have apparently been actively promoting their free central tracing scheme—at least, three of them—and, indeed, have generally been hotting up the desire to try to find the owners of dormant accounts. In some of the representations I have received, it is said that the banks have received unprecedented volumes of claims and inquiries, which suggests that they were not actually pursuing the matter very enthusiastically before. I do not think that merely going along the road they are taking now is likely to find as many owners of dormant accounts as could be found by the process that I described yesterday. The difficulty is that it involves publishing names. As I said yesterday, I have not in my experience in a different context found any problem with that. There is also the question—I am now relating directly to the amendment—of what happens when the money not having been found by the banks ends up in the reclaim fund. I understand that it is still possible, and it is the intention that it should be possible, for people to claim against the reclaim fund. I presume that that means the individual will have to apply, but unless they know there is an account in a particular name, they will not be able to do so, other than the shotgun effect of everyone writing in saying, ““It is my money””. I hope that this will be done at the first stage, but even so it is likely that it will have to be done at the second stage once the unclaimed money arrives in the reclaim account. I am worried about my noble friend’s amendment, which refers in specific terms to, "““‘personal information’ …which relates to, and identifies, a particular person””." I presume by ““identify””, one means the name; otherwise I am not clear what the term means. Clearly it would be highly undesirable to disclose the amount or the interest being paid. We now understand that such information will be passed from the banks to the reclaim account but it is undesirable that it should be revealed. It is essential that the names be revealed, both at the first stage—when, it is to be hoped, it will clear many of the accounts—and at the second stage. The problem is that the banks are thinking all the time in terms of customers, but some of these accounts have been dormant for a very long time and the customers have probably long since died. The accounts, therefore, are likely to remain for a long while. But there is, none the less, a legitimate claim against the account by the heirs of the person who has died. They will not know that they are able to claim, or that there is an account against which they can claim, unless they know that great aunt Sally, unbeknown to them, had an account with this or that bank, or subsequently with the reclaim fund. Therefore, while we want to preserve confidentiality on all the details, identification is necessary. If we are to get the money back to the rightful people before we distribute it to charities or wherever, this needs to be done. So I have doubts about the precise wording of my noble friend’s amendment.