Dormant Bank and Building Society Accounts Bill [HL]

The Minister has raised the issue of the estimates. It is worth reiterating what I said earlier: is it really likely that the British Bankers’ Association would produce figures for how much money the banks could produce and then radically undershoot them? That is the Minister’s suggestion, that these are such appalling estimates that they might be dramatically wrong. The banks would look very foolish and come in for an awful lot of criticism if they said, ““Our estimate is £250 million to £350 million””, and it came out at £150 million. I do not think that is the way banks work. I think they have a good idea of how much money there is in these unclaimed funds. I understand where the Minister is coming from. He wants to give himself plenty of wiggle-room here, so he said that people may come back and claim on these accounts. Well, hold on. Fifteen years is the shortest time that these accounts have been unclaimed. Some of them go back 50 years or much further. If people have not had the opportunity to lay claim to these accounts for what may be decades, why are they suddenly going to do so because someone transfers them out of the bank to somewhere else? There may be an element of people reclaiming these accounts, but are we talking about more than 5 per cent of the total assets? I very much doubt it. To come back to the question of whether the social investment wholesaler is a bank, I notice that the Minister has completely ignored my point about gearing. Gearing is what this is all about: turning £100 million into a minimum of £300 million—possibly, over a period, into £1 billion. That is the significant thing. When we talk about this wholesaler, is it going to be in a position to gear things up? The advantage of a bank is that it becomes completely independent. It ring-fences the funds so that they go in and there is no way they can come out again. The Government cannot get hold of them in any way. Once the funds have gone in, they are in the bank, and then they can be geared up and become much more. That is significant. The most important thing about the social investment bank is that it will be independent and have the capacity to turn certain sums of money into multiples of that money, which will then be available for these enterprises. The noble Lord asked whether the retail banks, the big four—I cannot remember how many we have got now—would regard this as competition. That is a bit of a scare. I do not think the retail banks are remotely interested in getting involved in investing in social enterprises because they know that they are incredibly risky. They have not done anything about them up until now and I do not think they are going to start. So that is not a serious consideration. However, the independence of this organisation is absolutely critical. Turning to the money, let us suppose the Minister is right and there is not £500 million. You need a critical mass of £250 million which you could phase in over three years. It does not all need to be there on day one because you can get the bank started and going with a much smaller sum, and if additional sums came in over a period that would certainly be an option. Even then, if the Minister is so worried about these figures and thinks that they are so suspect that he cannot trust them, why does he not consider giving a percentage to the social investment bank? It would be a good idea if 50 per cent of the total funds transferred over were to go into the social investment bank. If for some reason everything undershoots and the figures are not what everyone expects them to be, then clearly the agony would be shared by both the good causes that are going to benefit anyway and the social investment bank. There are ways round it. We have to adhere to the principle that we are setting up an independent organisation which can gear up on these funds and make much more out of the money that comes in.