Dormant Bank and Building Society Accounts Bill [Lords]

It is my understanding that the normal parliamentary use of the word ““sanction”” is such that it can include a range of measures; there might be penalties and fines, but others might also apply. Perhaps I am using the word loosely in this circumstance, but the direction in question is clearly a power to direct a company to conform with its articles of association under the law. Amendment No. 11 would add the requirement for the reclaim fund to include in its articles an obligation to publish the names of all banks and building societies on the FSA register in respect of which no moneys were transferred. As I said in Committee, I have reflected carefully on the debate about having a requirement to publish a list of non-participants, and I am grateful for the opportunity to address the point again today. We remain committed to doing everything we can to ensure that the scheme is transparent. Our scheme already places comprehensive requirements on the reclaim fund to publish information about how the scheme is working, including the following: a list of participating institutions; the amount of money that is going to transferred into the scheme, by individual institution; the amount of money reclaimed by account holders post-transfer, by individual institution; and the amounts transferred to the Big Lottery Fund. The Government's amendments in Committee also require the reclaim fund to publish its annual accounts and company reports as soon as possible after the end of the financial year. I hope that that demonstrates that we have listened to the debate and are seeking to reinforce the transparency of the scheme where it is possible to do so, but I remain of the view that we should not go further and require the reclaim fund to publish a list of non-participants drawn from the FSA online register of all FSA-authorised institutions. On one level, that would be unnecessary. The names of all banks and building societies operating in the UK are available from the FSA's website. The FSA currently publishes a bespoke list of banks, which is updated on a monthly basis, and a list of building societies is also accessible from its website via a simple search of its online register, which is updated every day. New requirements, in addition to the material published by the FSA, would place an unnecessary burden on the reclaim fund. If the reclaim fund were obliged to recreate or redesign the FSA's lists, it would effectively have to monitor the market, as the regulator currently does, for firms entering and exiting the market, and that is not its function. On the amendment, I am concerned about the unintended consequences of naming and shaming institutions that appear on the FSA register but are not participating in the scheme, because some might be eligible to participate but not be in possession of dormant accounts to transfer into the scheme. Banks may be FSA-authorised to accept retail deposits, but may not currently undertake this activity, or they may not have a book going back as far as 15 years. More than 300 banks and building societies are authorised as deposit takers by the FSA. Among them, there may be institutions without dormant accounts. Such a requirement would not be useful for consumers or fair for the individual institutions. Requiring the reclaim fund to publish a more refined list of institutions would be an additional and unreasonable burden on it. Before moving on to amendment No. 12, let me clarify the position I outlined on remuneration in response to a question from the hon. Member for Broxbourne (Mr. Walker). Expenses must be reasonable, as set out in schedule 1, and the reclaim fund will make this transparent. On the point about sanctions raised by my hon. Friend the Member for Wolverhampton, South-West (Rob Marris), if the reclaim fund failed to comply with legislation, the Government would have the power to seek an injunction from the court to ensure that that was rectified. On amendment No. 12, I am inching towards what the hon. Member for Fareham (Mr. Hoban) had to say. The amendment would require the Treasury to publish its direction-making powers. This provision was set out in the memorandum to the Delegated Powers and Regulatory Reform Committee, which did not comment on it in its report. We therefore do not feel that there is any particular reason to include in legislation a requirement that any direction be published. As I have said, although we do not expect to use this power, I am not aware of any likely reasons why, if we were to do so, it should not be made public to the House in the form of a written or oral statement, without having put a requirement in the Bill for it to be published. We could return to this matter in the other place, but I do not think it is a substantive issue, because we do not expect to use this power, and if we were to do so, we would want to be clear about why we were using it and make statements in the usual way.