Dormant Bank and Building Society Accounts Bill [HL]

I gave notice that I intended to oppose the Question that Clause 9 shall stand part. At our last Sitting, I tabled Amendments Nos. 33 and 35 to Clause 9, which were intended to tease out the meaning of the drafting. In the event, the 7.30 pm Grand Committee curtain came down before we were able to complete our discussions and I promised the Minister that I would try to find a way of bringing back the points to continue them. Since we were in the middle of our discussions of Clause 9, I was able to continue our debate under the simple device of clause stand part. I will remind the Minister what I asked on our last Committee day because that was some time ago. I first probed what was meant in subsection (1) of Clause 9 about an account which ““consisted only of money””. I pointed out that accounts always consisted of money because that is how accounts are expressed. I asked the Minister to explain what subsection (1) was intended to include or exclude and I hope that he can give some examples so that the Committee can be clear about what is intended. Secondly, I probed why subsection (2) restricted accounts to those which are part of a bank's ““activity of accepting deposits””. I asked how that applied to accounts that arrived in the bank through other financial services. I cited the specific example of a self-invested pension plan, which includes a bank account. How is a customer to know whether his account falls within subsection (2)? Again, I asked the Minister to give some examples of what is intended to be included or excluded by virtue of subsection (2) to bring the policy intent behind Clause 9 to life. In Committee, the Minister replied that the Government wanted to restrict this Bill to ordinary current and deposit accounts. He said a lot of other things as well but they were not relevant to the issues that I raised. In particular, he did not respond to the questions that I raised in respect of subsections (1) and (2) and did not give any examples to clarify why, if the Government intended to restrict this Bill to current and deposit accounts, the Bill does not simply say that it should be so restricted, with appropriate definitions. I tabled the clause-stand-part objection to enable the Minister to reply to the points that we did not fully get a chance to explore in December and to gain greater enlightenment of the Government's intention behind Clause 9.