Dormant Bank and Building Society Accounts Bill [HL]

I support my noble friend. The obligation has moved from the banks and building societies to the reclaim fund and, as the noble Lord, Lord Newby, suggested, it is quite unfair to put the obligation on them. I am extremely unhappy about the Big Lottery Fund spending all this money. I will be coming to this when we deal with the question of the social investment bank. This will be a one-time splurge of money that may possibly substitute even taxpayers’ funds and, if it does not do that, it will be other lottery funds—if it is neither of those it will be very surprising. At the end of this spending, when the money starts to run out, people will ask whether any is left in the reclaim fund. There will be enormous public pressure to spend down any reserves that that fund has. The people who run the fund may responsibly say that they are going to keep quite a large sum of money in case there are later claims. But the pressure will be there, and we know that political life is such that, when the heat comes on, the question will be, ““Well, you have all this money; it is not yours. Why don’t you pay it out? People desperately need it””, and so on. It will be difficult to resist that pressure. Therefore, ultimately the Treasury, rather like the Northern Rock example, will find itself paying up anyway, so it might as well give that guarantee. I share my noble friend’s reservations about Treasury guarantees on anything, but we are not talking about inordinate sums of money in Treasury terms. If the fund is sensibly run, this should never arise anyway. I do not believe that the Treasury would be putting its head in a very big noose by undertaking to do this; it would be a more sensible way of seeing the matter through.