Dormant Bank and Building Society Accounts Bill [Lords]

New clause 1 clearly shows that there has been some movement on the issue since we debated it in Committee. I am not entirely clear from the speech given by the hon. Member for Taunton (Mr. Browne) how he expects the register to work in practice. For example, it is not clear whether we are talking about a voluntary register, which would go with the grain of the scheme envisaged in the Bill, or a compulsory register, to which banks and building societies would have to sign up. That is an important distinction to draw. As I mentioned, the scheme in the Bill is voluntary; banks and building societies have the right to opt into it. All the arrangements are predicated on that basis. I am not entirely clear from the hon. Gentleman whether he will require banks and building societies to put this information on a register and therefore convert the scheme from a voluntary to a compulsory scheme. He may wish to intervene to clarify that. I think that we all accept that charities want to maximise their income from legacies, and there is a set of circumstances in which they are not in a position to do so because they do not have the right to access the ““mylostaccount”” website, which is the portal that has been used to allow individuals to search for dormant bank, building society and NS&I accounts. It is not clear to me whether the hon. Gentleman expects that voluntary scheme to be superseded by his register. He did not talk about the interaction between the two processes and whether for charities the compulsory or voluntary register would supersede that scheme. He touched on my objection in Committee about the confidentiality of information, although I do not think that he has gone as far as I would have liked him to have done to reassure us. Just because it is a registered charity that has access to the register, that does not necessarily act as a tight limit on the number of people who could access that information. We need to be careful that we do not provide a window that people will use to commit fraud or to go on fishing expeditions for personal information. I do not think that the assurances that he gave dealt with that point. The other important aspect that the hon. Gentleman did not touch upon is how much this will cost. We are being asked to establish a register for charities, which could be an expensive process. It would require banks to put data away to enable them to transfer it across to the register and there would be a registrar who would look after the register, which would have to be updated regularly and made available. There would be systems costs, input costs and data protection costs. One of the merits of the current scheme is that it should be a relatively lower cost operation than a compulsory scheme, because every extra pound that is spent on administration is a pound less for the good causes specified later in the Bill. I am concerned that we have had no explanation of the cost of the scheme. The hon. Gentleman may return to that in his winding up; I do not know. Perhaps his opening speech was just a warm up for his conclusion. The question is whether this is a proportionate remedy to the potential loss that charities face. Part of the problem is that we do not have a sense of how much money is at stake here for charities. No hon. Member would want to see a disproportionate solution being proposed to the concern that charities will lose out as a consequence of the Bill because they will not have the power to search for bequests. It is helpful to note that the British Bankers Association has offered to work with the charities to try to identify the scale of the problem. That would enable the charitable sector, the banks and the Treasury to determine whether there is a significant problem that needs to be tackled. That could be picked up formally through new clause 3(1)(b) which states that the Treasury can review"““the effectiveness of the efforts made by financial institutions to secure that those entitled to the money in inactive accounts are made aware of the fact.””" It would fall within that new clause to check whether charities are losing out and by how much, and therefore to determine what action can be taken to improve the flow of money through to charities. There is a strong argument that the charitable sector may lose access to funds as a consequence of the arrangements in the Bill, but I have yet to be convinced that the hon. Gentleman's proposed mechanism would be a proportionate response to the problem, and that it would contain adequate safeguards. There is a risk that, actually, it would undermine the voluntary nature of the Bill, and that the cost of operating the scheme would be such that it would reduce the amount of money to be made available to other good causes.