Dormant Bank and Building Society Accounts Bill [HL]

Following on what the noble Lord, Lord Newby, said, it could be difficult to introduce a safeguard. I have a lot of sympathy with the amendment and I wish to see some of the things looked for in the amendment happen. If we look through the Government’s end of the telescope, it is very difficult, and, of course, it is the same telescope and is looked at through the same end by the Big Lottery Fund. In its annual report, under ““Policy Directions””, it says: "““The Big Lottery Fund is a non-departmental public body and therefore operates under Policy Directions issued by its sponsor department, the Department of Culture, Media and Sport. The Policy Directions set out the principles with which the Big Lottery Fund must comply””." A house divided against itself shall surely fall. There we are: the Big Lottery Fund is a part of government and it must comply. Let us then look from the other end of the telescope. When will the public judge that something done is additional? That is a key consideration and the matter of perception which the noble Lord, Lord Newby, raised. The public will use phrases such as, ““That would never have happened if it had been left to the local authority””, or ““The Treasury would never have supported that””. The Treasury supports the transfer of lottery funds to the Olympics. In contrast, the public might judge that one would have expected such and such a playground to be funded from public taxation rather than from lottery funds. The judgments reached depend on two principal factors. The first is how independent is the funding body concerned; the second is how that body will present its own case for saying that what it is doing is additional. I again refer the Committee to the publications of the Big Lottery Fund, which do not set out to say, ““Here we are. We are genuinely independent, and we have made this decision which we are pretty sure the DCMS would not have liked, but nevertheless we have made it, and that shows how independent we are””. There is no sense of a dialogue and a debate. It seems seamlessly to be agreed between the two that what is being done is being done in the right way. It is therefore difficult, if not impossible, for Big to argue its own additionality. After all, Big must comply, and it is a public body that is subject to policy directions and the discussions behind them. In some number of years’ time, we shall no doubt be able to read the minutes of those meetings. As the centralising influence of government has steadily reduced the independence of public bodies, so it has become more important to look for a private- sector solution, and nowhere more so than in the third sector—or as I would still prefer to call it, the charitable sector. National charitable distributors such as the Wellcome Trust, the Esmée Fairbairn Foundation or the Henry Smith Charity have no impediment to their decisions on additionality. If we want additionality, we need the private sector, and we need competition for the available dormant funds. Government need to be as little involved as possible, and the public given the chance to identify additionality. Within the centrally controlled public sector, additionality is most probably unlikely to be achieved and quite likely to be an objective which it is not worth pursuing.