Dormant Bank and Building Society Accounts Bill [HL]

My Lords, I am delighted to support each one of these small but important amendments in this group. The noble Baroness, Lady Finlay, referred to the 54 charities that comprise the Unclaimed Assets Charity Coalition. I know from my own contacts with the group how passionately those charities feel about this matter. These amendments afford your Lordships’ House an opportunity to improve the legislation before us and to enact a profound good. At this stage of our deliberations I do not intend to repeat the powerful arguments advanced by the noble Baroness. Instead, I shall draw your Lordships’ attention to the benefits of the amendments in a slightly broader strategic context. Here I declare an interest as a trustee of Christian Aid and chairman of the Melanesian Mission UK. Of the first of these charities most, if not all, of your Lordships must surely be aware, but of the second I suspect that few will have heard. Yet it is the latter, the Melanesian Mission UK, which, as the smaller charity, is particularly pertinent to our deliberations today. Why? For the simple reason that legacies are even more important to smaller charities, which simply do not have the means or the infrastructure to fundraise to anything like the same extent as the bigger charities. They lack the resources to engage in a complex search for assets that, in the form of legacies, it was intended that they should receive and they stand to lose disproportionately more from the lack of an ability to do so. Like the noble Baroness, I have looked at the membership of the charity coalition that has expressed such concerns about the Bill in its present form. The breadth of the coalition is extensive and impressive. I also know from my own experience from chairing bodies such as the Devon Strategic Partnership—its aim is to improve the quality of life for people living in Devon by bringing together a huge and disparate range of interested parties to tackle a diverse range of issues such as transport, energy, domestic violence and welfare benefits—that bringing people together to sing from the same hymn sheet is not easy. Yet this coalition is singing from the same hymn sheet. It deserves to be listened to in this one respect more than it has been to date. I am told that at least 26 Members of your Lordships’ House are patrons of some of the charities within the coalition. Many others will have supported these and other charities in many different ways. With these amendments, we are being given the opportunity not just to do as the Minister rightly suggested on Report, which is to thank our marvellous charity sector for the invaluable work that it does, but to give a practical demonstration of our support for all charities, which are so vital in a healthy society, whether they be small or great, in memory of a loved one or an international charity such as Christian Aid that is literally changing the world for people in the direst poverty and offering them real hope of life before death. The point at issue is not just about gratitude. It is also most profoundly about justice and respect—not just for and to the charities but for and to those who do, and wish to, support them and who have made their wishes very clear as they have drawn up their last will and testament in preparation for their own death. It is about the justice of doing everything that we reasonably can to respect people’s dying wishes to leave something to charity and of ensuring that charities are thus reunited with any unclaimed assets that have been bequeathed to them; in other words, what is rightfully theirs. That is what the noble Baroness’s reasonable, tightly defined and beneficial amendments would help to achieve and it is why I urge your Lordships to give them the support that they deserve.