Dormant Bank and Building Society Accounts Bill [Lords]

The hon. Lady misses the point. We do not know how much the banks have, but they will trumpet how much they are giving out. They are already doing so. As we have heard today, some banks are successfully reuniting the accounts with their owners, and that is the best effect that the legislation will have. It will ensure that banks do their best to reunite owners of bank accounts with their accounts in the hope that they will hold on to them. Once the owners know that they account is there, they may well leave it with that bank. That is an incentive, which did not exist before. The voluntary scheme runs the risk of being manipulated or ignored, as I said. Either way, or even in the unlikely event of full compliance, we will be wholly unable to discern which has taken place. It seems that the Bill will leave many in the House and many outside who are concerned about the matter feeling like Oedipus wandering blindly through the countryside. Unless we act to increase the amount of information in the public domain, our blindness, like that of Oedipus, will have been self-inflicted. Will the Minister assure us today that if a voluntary scheme is pursued and the information provided is found wanting, she will at least offer the public greater information, so that there is a greater possibility that voluntary regulation may work? That would include a fuller definition of the term ““dormant””, and a compulsory report by all banks of how much they give to the fund and whether that is the full amount of dormant funds that they hold under a preset wider definition. Lastly, the audit of dormant accounts in this country that will take place should be made public knowledge, to give some idea of the genuine amount of unclaimed assets held by British banks and building societies. For years banks have been the problem when it comes to utilising dormant funds. It seems prudent not to rely wholly on the problem being its own solution, but as it currently stands, that is exactly what the voluntary scheme is doing. However, if the Chief Secretary feels that the provision of further information is not an appropriate course of action, I urge her again to consider adding a reserve power to the Bill to make the scheme mandatory at a later date without recourse to primary legislation. That view was supported by the Treasury Committee and is also supported by early-day motion 346—a cross-party motion with 92 signatories. As my hon. Friend the Member for High Peak (Tom Levitt) mentioned earlier, the proposal is also supported by the National Council for Voluntary Organisations, which has done a great deal of work on the Bill. The Government rejected the idea of a reserve power, stating that they had no wish to grant themselves sweeping secondary powers that could be used on a whim. However, the Government frequently pass into legislation wider secondary powers than that. Will the Minister today recognise that such a power would not be unnecessarily large, but a wise precaution when ensuring the compliance of private interests, especially so in the light of recent revelations about the banking industry's wholesale failure to invest in a manner that will safeguard public savings? On the asymmetry of the scheme, the lack of enforcement and control procedures in the collection of funds appears to be paralleled only by the enormous amounts of regulation attached to the distribution of those funds. The asymmetry between the two halves of the scheme is worrying. The banking industry is trusted with a light-touch approach, but the Big Lottery Fund has strict mandates concerning to whom, how and when it must maintain and donate. The current Bill is an entity with two different sides. It is odd to see so little and so much regulation seated side by side.