Dormant Bank and Building Society Accounts Bill [Lords]

The hon. Gentleman has just walked in; if he sits down and is patient, I might give way to him in a moment. Let me just make this basic point: other countries have compulsory schemes and their registration schemes are part of that. If we had a registration scheme, a number of issues would be raised. How would the register be enforced and monitored? What would be the legal penalties for non-compliance? Those major issues would have to be dealt with through additional primary legislation, so we could not take such a step lightly. Furthermore, significant amounts of data would be moving to a different system. At the moment, individuals can interrogate the current banking system, with all its firewalls for confidentiality, through the ““mylostaccount”” website. Having a registration scheme would mean that all the personal information of the depositors of accounts worth about £400 million to £500 million would have to be transferred to a registrar who would operate a new scheme, and that would raise serious data protection issues. As the hon. Member for Fareham suggested, it would also raise significant cost issues by placing a significant administrative burden on the scheme. Fundamentally, I do not believe that we as a Government should be taking the reserve powers suggested by the hon. Member for Taunton, which are not necessary. Nor are they desirable, because they would challenge the fundamentally voluntary nature of the scheme, raise serious data protection and confidentiality issues and, in the view of some people, raise concerns about the potential for fraud. Including these powers in legislation would not be a good use of parliamentary time. They would have significant implications for future primary legislation, because they could not be created by this provision alone but would require further clauses to be inserted into this Bill or, probably, an extensive consultation period and a completely new additional Bill. For those reasons, I invite hon. Members to oppose new clause 1.