Dormant Bank and Building Society Accounts Bill [HL]

It is important that we are focused when thinking about how the money is to be used. If confidence in the fund is to be built, the money needs to be used in a way which has a distinctive flavour and achieves something which will not be achieved by other means. My heart sank a little when we spoke of building youth centres. Those of us in the faith communities and the churches have been involved in work with young people for a long time. Buildings are important, and churches sometimes struggle with that, but it is the relationships and the quality of the work that are really important. We must be focused. When the new fund comes under public scrutiny, it is important that it does not fall into the trap of being felt to be used for things that should be financed by other means—I have in mind the public debate around the lottery fund. If we are going to use the fund for young people—I am very supportive of that idea—we must do some careful thinking so that the way in which the fund is used is innovative. Surely we need to frame the legislation in a way that is enabling of the people who are going to make decisions to have the freedom to make them. We must be careful lest Governments or anybody else so constrain the scheme that it does not have the freedom to manoeuvre in the areas that it is given to cover. We must be careful to frame the clauses in such a way as not to box the whole scheme in. I want to see the scheme being innovative; I want to see it working in ways which make good sense on the ground. If it is to support young people, it must be for the building of good relationships and good-quality relational work, and it must recognise where that work is taking place and what needs building up and supporting. I want to see the fund build confidence by having that distinctive flavour, with people seeing that it is something new, different and making a distinctive contribution.