Dormant Bank and Building Society Accounts Bill [Lords]

My hon. Friend has an accountancy background, not a legal background, but he is absolutely right to use the term, ““a reasonably thorough search””. Executors have to take reasonable steps; they do not have to search to the ends of the earth to find assets that might be brought into the estate and distributed in accordance with the law on intestacy, or the wishes of the deceased. That brings me neatly to my point about the way in which the new clause is framed. It does not do what I—and, I suspect, those who tabled it—would like it to do. It focuses on charity, for obvious reasons, but there is a simpler way of doing things. I preface my remarks by saying that I think that there should be a register. There is a body that hands out grants of probate. One applies to it, shows it that there is a valid will, and that one is the executor and so on, and one gets a nice, stamped document back with ““grant of probate”” on the top. It has the name of the executor on it, and the name of the deceased, whose estate the executor is going to sort out. I cannot remember the body's name, because it is a quarter of a century since I did such work. When that body—I think that it is a court of some sort—acceded to a request for a grant of probate and sent out that grant of probate, it could check a register to see whether the deceased had any dormant bank accounts. It could then let the executors know. If there was a dormant bank account, the executor could get the money back from the reclaim fund and use it to increase the value of the estate. Those who were entitled to distribution from that estate, be they individuals or charities, would then get more money. Let us have a register, but it would be much simpler if the court that hands out grants of probate could simply check that register—that would, to some extent, deal with data protection issues—and inform the executors that it knew that there was a dormant bank account, because it had found the name on the register. That would be a much simpler way of doing things. It would benefit charities, which is what those who tabled the new clause admirably wish to do, and benefit others.