Dormant Bank and Building Society Accounts Bill [HL]

My Lords, I warmly support these amendments that were so ably proposed by my noble friend Lady Finlay. I want to express my hope that the Government will give them a fair wind. I must declare an interest since in the course of my medical career I have become either president or vice-president, or patron or vice-patron, of about 11 medical charities of various kinds. While I accept some of the constraints that were mentioned by the noble Lord, Lord Hamilton, and others, I must point out that the contribution to medical research and care made by charities in the United Kingdom has been absolutely outstanding. There is no doubt at all that, despite the significant increases of government funding that we have seen in recent years—through organisations such as the Medical Research Council, the National Health Service, and so on—those charities produce at least 50 per cent of the funds spent on medical research in the United Kingdom and they are largely dependent on bequests. I am, of course, not just talking about big players such as the British Heart Foundation, Cancer Research UK, or the Wellcome Trust, which has been quite outstanding in its support, but, more particularly, the smaller charities that have often been established by people with an interest in specific diseases. I refer to charities such as the Multiple Sclerosis Society, the Motor Neurone Disease Association, the Parkinson’s Disease Society, the Alzheimer’s Society and the Muscular Dystrophy Campaign, of which I have the honour to be an honorary life president. Such charities are, to a large extent, dependent on bequests and so on; in some instances, there is no doubt that funds which should and would have come to them under bequests have, somehow or other, been left in dormant accounts. This amendment is a step along the road in trying to put that position right. Despite what was said by the noble Lord, Lord Hamilton, charitable foundations have made a tremendous contribution—not just to fundamental research and the care of sufferers from many of these diseases with which I have been familiar throughout my professional career, but in funding translational research. That has meant that they are funding research that translates the findings of basic laboratory research into developments in patient care. For that reason alone, I am very happy to support the amendments.