Dormant Bank and Building Society Accounts Bill [HL]

I want to ask the Minister to do something, and at a later stage we might discuss it. I want him to go into the Big Lottery Fund’s website and look at what is there—there is a great deal of information there—and see if he can come out with an understanding of what the Big Lottery Fund does. I shall give a very small example to the Committee. The other day I fell into conversation with somebody in my village in north Yorkshire—a thing that happens pretty frequently—and he said, ““You’ll be very interested to hear that we’re applying to the Big Lottery Fund for some breathing space money””. I asked him how much and he said, ““We think about £1,500””. It is not difficult to breathe in north Yorkshire and there is plenty of space, but the particular space concerned is a plot of land that were the foundations—and there were very few of them—of a 1920s village hall made of wood and corrugated iron, which became unsafe. The right reverend Prelate will be pleased to hear that we are using the church instead of the village hall because the church is not fully used the whole time. There is going to be a study of this piece of ground, which is next to an abandoned garden, and there will be a specialist wild flower consultant coming to look at this piece of ground. We are going to put in an application. By my calculation, if that had been given to me to make into a vegetable garden, I could probably have done it in about 100 hours if I were about 20 years younger than I am—and I will bet that about 100 hours are spent assessing whether to give us a grant of £1,500 for a wild flower garden that within two years would otherwise be invaded by nettles. That is my perception of a piece of the Big Lottery Fund. On the name Big, it was very important to the Government to have an anonymous name, because they have the power to direct what it does. Noble Lords have heard its definition of additionality—and I do not want to fight about additionality at all, because it is not relevant. You can do with it what you will, as the Minister told us earlier. We have had those fights and they are not important; the important thing was to have the Big Lottery Fund in the Government’s hand so that from time to time they could change what it did without anybody understanding why they had come to that decision. That is why the website is so important. Ring-fencing the money from dormant bank accounts is no problem to the Big Lottery Fund. Having been the chief executive of the Commonwealth Development Corporation, which distributed money all over the third world, I am perfectly well aware of how you deal with that—you just ring-fence it. But that does not mean to say that you are not doing within the ring-fenced piece exactly what you might be doing within the other piece. There is no reason why you should not do what you want, some of it here and some of it there. Transparency is argued, but my response would be that it is much more like a Kafka novel than it is like transparency.