Dormant Bank and Building Society Accounts Bill [Lords]

That is interesting, and it does not reflect well on the people of the northern part of Derbyshire who are obviously more careless than the people in the southern part of Derbyshire—I hope that does not get reported. [Interruption.] Indeed. Taking the figure of 244 such accounts in my constituency as an average—which might be an overestimate—given that it is said that the average sum per account is £316, there is about £50 million over the country as a whole from HBOS alone that should be available for this scheme. That figure must then be multiplied by the sums for the other banks and building societies as well, so we are talking about a lot of money. I want to talk about the issue of whether this scheme should be mandatory or voluntary, on which I made an intervention earlier in the debate. When my hon. Friend the Economic Secretary sums up, I would like him to make a point—he might write this down now in capital letters—of listing for us all the Treasury regulations that are voluntary. Which of the current regulations can financial institutions opt in or out of as they choose? I think that will be a very short list. I do not see what the point is of having optional regulations. As has been said, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, the United States of America and Spain all have dormant account recovery schemes and none of them has gone for the voluntary approach, because they realise they cannot get as much social value and investment coming from those dormant accounts through voluntary means; my hon. Friend the Member for South Derbyshire articulated that point well. A mandatory scheme would be equitable because it would treat every financial institution involved in exactly the same way. At the very least, I urge my hon. Friend the Economic Secretary that we must have, as the hon. Member for Bromsgrove said, a reserve power so that we do not have to return to this House when we find in a few years' time that the voluntary approach has produced very good results from some institutions and negligible results from others, because that is the way it will work. I take on board the Chief Secretary's point at the beginning of the debate that a triennial report is probably more important in the early years of the working of the scheme, and I think that after one or two years we would probably know how successful the scheme is, so I am willing to go along with her on that to some extent. However, I think there needs to be at least one triennial report to review the effectiveness of the scheme and to examine how much money banks and building societies have transferred for reinvestment. I am agnostic about whether 15 years is the right length of time after which to declare an account dormant. I am fighting the case of a constituent whose dormant account is 10 years old and appears to have disappeared completely already. Fifteen years is probably a bit on the long side, but such a period does indicate that control of and interest in an account has been lost. Finally, I want to look at the distribution mechanism. The National Lottery Act 2006 gave the Big Lottery Fund the power and authority to handle non-lottery as well as lottery funding. The Arts Council and Sport England also have the same powers, as I understand it. More than 80 per cent. of those who took part in the consultation on who should be the distributor of unclaimed assets said that the Big Lottery Fund was the correct organisation to do it. It is already responsible for delivering half the funding raised through the national lottery to projects across the UK concerning health, education, the environment and charitable purposes. The themes that we have heard about so far as the Bill and the focus of this money are concerned are totally appropriate for that. I find it a bit odd that the issue of additionality was brought up by the hon. Member for Fareham (Mr. Hoban) earlier. Additionality was one of the sticks with which the Conservative party used to beat the Big Lottery Fund and its predecessors. However, the Big Lottery Fund won the argument over the years, and we have not had an argument for three or four years about additionality. Although there may be grey areas and areas where funding is complementary, we accept that the taxpayer, through the Government, has certain obligations, but that complementary funding from other sources is wholly appropriate. What is more, the Big Lottery Fund has won the trust of the people for being fair in the way that it delivers, and it certainly has the experience. The young people project, through the Young People's Fund and YouthBank UK, was a lottery project that gave young people themselves direct input into decision-making projects regarding who should benefit from the funding. I hope that that practice will be taken up again in this instance. The Big Lottery Fund has experience of individual financial management and access to personal financial services through the advice plus programme, through which it awarded more than £11 million to projects for financing and fundraising across the UK. As a social investment wholesaler, it knows that partnership is the key to delivering projects, avoiding duplication and making effective use of funding. The £50 million ““fair share”” programme, for example, operated in 77 areas of the UK, working in collaboration with the Community Foundation Network—a much underestimated body—to get money to where it really works: inside our communities. I very much welcome the fact that we are talking not just about grants so far as distribution is concerned—another Member touched on this issue—but about loans and endowments being made through this funding. All of that helps to create a much more sustainable form of funding, whether or not it is within the life of the funding stream, in so far as it goes. There is therefore no need to debate who the distributor should be—the Big Lottery Fund has won that argument. It has a record of appropriate funding, and of openness and transparency and accountability to Parliament. It has well-established offices in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland and in the English regions. On financial efficiency, according to the National Audit Office, its overheads, at 9.1 per cent., are lower than any of the other lottery distributors', so it is an obvious and satisfactory choice of distributor. We will have some interesting debates in Committee, and I hope that there will be some movement on the mandatory versus voluntary issue, because that is the only way that the provision can be made reliable, as well as sustainable.