Dormant Bank and Building Society Accounts Bill [Lords]

This has been an interesting and wide-ranging debate covering many significant matters in the Bill, and, indeed, some that are outside of it. I am grateful to all hon. Members for their contributions, and for the generally constructive way in which they made their points. As has been said, the purpose of the Bill is to enable money in dormant bank and building society accounts to be reinvested for the benefit of the wider community, while at the same time ensuring that consumers are protected, and I am delighted to welcome the unanimous support of all those who spoke in the debate today. In addition to those who speak for the Opposition on these matters, we also heard three very impressive contributions from my hon. Friends the Members for Clwyd, South (Mr. Jones), for South Derbyshire (Mr. Todd) and for High Peak (Tom Levitt). My hon. Friend the Member for Clwyd, South is a long-standing and passionate champion of using dormant accounts for good causes, and he made a number of important points. Likewise, my hon. Friend the Member for South Derbyshire, who has looked at these issues extensively, raised a number of points, and I shall try to address the key arguments that he put. Similarly, my hon. Friend the Member for High Peak raised a number of significant issues concerning the nature of the funding, which I hope to address in due course. We also had a number of probing contributions from the hon. Members for Bromsgrove (Miss Kirkbride), for Northampton, South (Mr. Binley), for Broxbourne (Mr. Walker), for Rochford and Southend, East (James Duddridge), for Cheltenham (Martin Horwood) and for West Suffolk (Mr. Spring).