Dormant Bank and Building Society Accounts Bill [HL]

moved Amendment No. 38: 38: Clause 10, page 6, line 30, after ““account,”” insert— ““( ) the bank or building society in question is aware that the holder of the account is unable to access the account for any reason,”” The noble Baroness said: Amendment No. 38 seeks to add a new paragraph after paragraph (a) of Clause 10(2). Subsection (2) defines the accounts which are treated as not dormant and my amendment would add that, "““the bank or building society in question is aware that the holder of the account is unable to access the account for any reason””." Clause 10 appears to contain no opportunity for banks to use their knowledge of account holders’ circumstances to prevent the attribution of dormancy. The way in which the clause is drafted contains reference to instructions or transactions but does not take account of any other knowledge. For example, let us suppose that when Aung San Suu Kyi returned to Burma in 1988 she left some bank accounts in the UK. That would not be implausible because she did not intend to spend the rest of her life outside the UK, and certainly would not have predicted that she would have been a virtual prisoner for most of that time. If she had such bank accounts in her name, would the banks under this definition be able to treat them as dormant? I suspect that they could. If she was not able to instruct any transactions within the terms of subsection (1)—and I rather doubt she would have instructed the bank not to communicate within the terms of subsection (2)—technically there is the potential for dormancy to arise. But if the bank knew of her personal circumstances—either because its officials read the newspapers or her UK family told the bank—surely that would be enough to stop dormancy arising. I beg to move.