Dormant Bank and Building Society Accounts Bill [HL]

We support the amendments. There are several reasons for believing that it makes sense for the public to be able to see how much money individual banks and building societies are passing across to the reclaim fund. First, as we were discussing earlier, in theory the banks will go back into the mists of time to identify orphaned and unclaimed assets to include in the scheme. If one bank is successful and assiduous in doing that and another bank is lax, a figure will help to draw that out. Equally, if one bank spends a lot of time and effort reuniting customers with their money and therefore pays across less to the reclaim scheme, that will also be apparent from having this kind of information available. The ability to compare the performance of banks and building societies via this information being in the public domain could be a good and effective way of putting pressure on them to use maximum efforts to reunite people with their money and to ensure that they are putting into the scheme all suitable assets.