Dormant Bank and Building Society Accounts Bill [HL]

moved Amendment No. 41A: 41A: Clause 10, page 6, line 34, at end insert ““, or ( ) the bank was aware of the current address of the holder of the account.”” The noble Baroness said: This amendment would add another sub-paragraph at the end of Clause 10(2). Its effect would be that an account should not be treated as dormant if the bank is aware of the current address of the account holder. This is one of the amendments suggested to us by the Law Society of Scotland, which, as we discussed during our previous day, tends to raise technical matters which are worthy of debate in Committee. A bank may be aware of the current address of a customer because it has other accounts with that customer or because it has had some other correspondence with the customer. The whole point of the Bill is to enable accounts which are ““lost”” to be put to good use. However, an account can never be lost if the bank is aware of the current address, and it would not be right for some technical definition, such as we have been talking about, to override practical common sense, which is the theme that has been emerging so far this afternoon. This is similar to Amendment No. 36, which I moved earlier, requiring banks or building societies to write to their customers alerting them to the consequences of the legislation. We know that not all addresses will be current and perhaps even a majority will not be current but, where an address is current and there is knowledge that it is current, that should be sufficient proof that the account is not dormant and it should not be transferred to the reclaim fund, with all the added complications for repayment that would ensue. I beg to move.