Dormant Bank and Building Society Accounts Bill [HL]

I am grateful, because it avoids repetition. I am always conscious that the tolerance of the Committee must not be stretched and repetition by me is one of the more heinous offences. I was seeking to avoid that. I will certainly address Amendment No. 69 also, because it is closely linked in concept to Amendments Nos. 66 and 68, although it has a different emphasis. We recognise that the motivation for these amendments is a concern to ensure a fair distribution of unclaimed assets across the United Kingdom. The intention of the amendments is to clarify what our approach is to be. We are concerned that apportionment will be on the crude basis of population. That is an important principle that I want to emphasise, because this is a UK-wide scheme. Also, in keeping with the principles of devolution, the devolved Administrations of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland are responsible for determining spending priorities that affect the needs of communities in those areas. We have designed the scheme in such a way as to enable spending decisions to be devolved. We expect to use a population-share formula as the means by which the available money is divided. It is of course for those concerned then to make their submissions to the scheme. The Big distributor, when it is dealing with Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, will have a separate approach to meeting demands within that framework. I never thought that I would refer to the formula without my noble friend being present, but I have the great joy of saying that the Barnett formula is the agreed and established method by which spending allocations to the devolved Administrations have been determined for some time. In fact, if my noble friend were here, he would tell me that we had just celebrated the formula’s 20th anniversary. Adopting Barnett principles is therefore the appropriate way to apportion money under the Bill. I recognise the dimension produced by the noble Lord, Lord Newby, in his amendment; I hope he will recognise that we are concerned to follow the principles of fairness across the devolved areas of Britain. Despite government expenditure which sometimes begins a process of correcting inequalities, a great deal of deprivation and poverty is still to be found in large concentrations in the devolved countries. We will use the population-share formula as the means by which the money is distributed. As I have indicated, it will be for those who seek access to these resources to make their case to Big, but in the framework under which charities and the lottery fund operate, if a well-defined claim is made for effective use of the money in a deprived community, it may have a marginally greater success than claims from other areas where there are more support services and the strength of their claims is, therefore, not as great. That issue will be decided by the committees of Big which make such decisions. Fairness should be underwritten in the Bill and that is the basis on which we propose to operate the scheme.