Dormant Bank and Building Society Accounts Bill [HL]

Let me try to explain again what I think that the noble Lord, Lord Shutt, and I are trying to get at. The noble Lord has put himself in the skin of the charities—the good causes—and wants to make sure that the maximum amount under the terms of the Bill gets into the reclaim fund and moves on via the Big Lottery Fund and so on. This definition makes sure that if an account is not technically closed, it can still be treated as a dormant account. What the noble Lord, Lord Shutt, asked in his important intervention was whether there was a distinction between an account that was closed and put in suspense, which is a conventional way of coming out of the active treatment of an account, and accounts that have been treated as extinct in an accounting sense, transferred out of suspense and sort of lost sight of in today’s accounting records. You could not look at those records and see the account because, in the past, it was transferred to profit. I think that the question put by the noble Lord, Lord Shutt, was: are we going to get those accounts or not as part of the reclaim fund activity?