Dormant Bank and Building Society Accounts Bill [HL]

My Lords, with all due respect to the noble Baroness and the right reverend Prelate, I confess that when this issue was raised in Committee I had reservations about it. I have even more now. This will be a great opportunity for fraudsters to examine the register in detail to determine whether they can extract money from it. I do not altogether understand who will carry the cost of drawing up the register and, indeed, of maintaining it. Some cost must be involved and I am not at all certain who is supposed to carry it. Another worry is that when charities look to people’s wills they surely look to bequests that come off the top layer of a will. The only thing that will be left in a dormant account is the residual amount in that will. Therefore, the charity would have had to be left absolutely everything in somebody’s will before it would be in a position to pick up what was left in a dormant account. I have a further concern about our charities generally. So many of them now seem to have massive headquarters in London and spend their whole time playing politics. The rather depressing thought occurs to me that they would add to their numbers by having yet another person to go through the register to see whether they can leach a bit more money out of dormant accounts. So I have reservations about this measure and it is only right that I should mention them.