Dormant Bank and Building Society Accounts Bill [Lords]

I support the concept of a register for some of the reasons set out. We could be doing many things to tighten data protection. For example, Wolverhampton city council has no port for a memory stick on many of its computers, so there is no chance of a memory stick with information on it going missing, because a memory stick cannot be plugged in. We are focusing on charities in the new clause. Although that focus is extremely worth while—I very much support what has been said about charities—it is too narrow, because individuals who should inherit money from dormant bank accounts could not do so, because of the regulations envisaged in the new clause. Charities could do so, as one class of beneficiary, but not individuals. That takes us on to a little of background on what happens on someone's death, which some hon. Members might not be aware of—I am; I was a solicitor before I entered the House. For shorthand, I will refer to executors, rather than referring in the legal way to executors and executrices and administrators and administratices, because that confuses people. In everyday terms, when someone dies without a will, administrators are appointed to deal with the estate. If someone dies with a will, executors are appointed. However, there will be a grant of letters of administration on intestacy or a grant of probate if someone dies with a valid will. However, for the sake of argument, let us simplify and say that those who deal with the estate are executors. The executors will distribute the money of which they are aware in accordance with the deceased's wishes if there is a will and in accordance with the law of intestacy if there is no will. If someone dies intestate and there is no beneficiary at all, the estate goes bona vacantia, which is referred to in the explanatory notes and means that the Crown gets it. If someone dies with a will and leaves a bequest to a charity in it, the charity should get the money. However, there may not be enough money in the estate, or it may be that the charity is the residuary beneficiary. For example, the will might say, ““I leave all my furniture to my kids, and everything else I've got goes to the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals.”” The RSPCA is then the residuary beneficiary, and gets everything that is left over after the furniture has gone to the kids. That residuary sum will be higher if there is a dormant bank account that can be brought back in to swell the estate. The RSPCA, in the example that I gave, would then get more. The difficulty with the wording of new clause 1, worthy as it is, is that it focuses only on charities. Let us say that someone dies and leaves several bequests in their will, which is quite common; often they leave a specific bequest of a named sum to a charity, and the residuary beneficiaries are their children. In that situation, the residuary beneficiaries may not get all that they are entitled to if they did not know that their deceased parent had a dormant bank account that had been swept into the reclaim fund, but that could come out of it if they ever found out about the account.