Dormant Assets Bill [HL]

Lord Bates Excerpts

2nd reading
Wednesday 26th May 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bates (Con)]

My Lords, it is a great privilege to speak in this debate. I very much welcome the Bill and support its Second Reading today. It is a great privilege to hear the maiden speech of my noble friend Lady Fleet; she brings incredible experience to bear on this important issue. I look forward to her future contributions in Committee.

I draw the attention of the House to my non-executive and non-financial charitable interests as listed in the register. I pay tribute to my noble friend Lady Barran for introducing the Bill and for her willingness to meet with us and officials beforehand to consider its contents and answer our questions. That courtesy was very much appreciated and extremely useful.

As has been said, the Bill has support on all sides of the House, and, after the past few Sessions, we need to see more of this type of legislation. It arrives here in excellent shape, building on the proven success of the 2008 Act. I wish all Bills were like it. Of course, that is to be expected when it is prepared by my noble friend Lady Barran, given her experience in the charitable sector and finance, and John Glen, who is simply a brilliant Economic Secretary to the Treasury. Given that preparation, I hope that the Bill can move quickly along its parliamentary journey so that people can be reunited with their forgotten assets.

I note that The Dormant Assets Scheme: A Blueprint for Expansion, a report that the industry champions presented, mentions the difficulty of tracking down the owners of these assets. I am sure that that is an issue, but if they thought that the owners of the assets owed money to them—banks, building societies and insurance companies—they might have a better success rate in tracking them down. This is a difficult issue, and we very much welcome the Bill.

When we have a Bill that is so universally welcomed and so clearly good-news legislation, one of the problems is that Second Reading speeches tend to range a little more widely than the Bill itself, and I tend to follow that theme. I will make four points about how the use of these proceeds could be improved. First, we need to remember that the Queen’s Speech that introduced the Bill had an overarching theme: levelling up. While the Covid pandemic has hit all communities, it has hit the poorest and most marginalised most. Few would deny that because of the pandemic, the challenge of levelling up has become much harder and far greater resources will therefore be required in order to recover.

My second point is that if left-behind communities in Britain have suffered disproportionately, it is the children and young people in those communities who have suffered most. I want to pay tribute to children and young people in this country. They sometimes get a raw deal and a bad press. They have been wrongly described as a “snowflake generation”, but they have shown discipline and resolve throughout this crisis in following the guidance and making sacrifices—more than most—despite being statistically at least risk from the virus. When our children and young people have made such a sacrifice and such a contribution to beating this pandemic, it behoves us to do all we can to level up for them.

Thirdly, we should devote our efforts to increasing the rate of return on these assets to honour the sacrifice of the former owners. I have two suggestions in this regard. The first is that we use the assets not so much as a fund per se but as a catalyst to generate further funds, perhaps through match-funding of projects. The second is that we give people who have been reunited with their dormant assets the option of donating them to the scheme for good causes.

Before people suggest that this would not be taken up, I should remind the House—not that noble Lords need reminding, but I will mention it—that the British people are among the most generous on the planet. The Charities Aid Foundation reported that in the first six months of the pandemic, donations to charities in the UK increased from £4.6 billion to £5.4 billion, a quite extraordinary £800 million increase compared with the same period during the previous year. In passing, I should say that this statistic slightly scuppers the justification for reducing the overseas aid commitment from 0.7% to 0.5% because of the economic crisis. The British taxpayers have demonstrated through their actions that they wanted to be more generous to good causes and those in need in hard times, not less.

Fourthly, volunteering is the greatest dormant asset in the United Kingdom. There have been two notable occasions in the past 10 years when we have called upon people to volunteer. The first was for the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games, when over a quarter of a million people volunteered for 70,000 roles, a response that almost caused the system to collapse. The Games-makers of London 2012 did indeed make the Games. The second time the call went out for volunteers was for 250,000 people to support the NHS during this crisis; 750,000 signed up.

On 28 February this year, the Sun newspaper, which has been running an excellent campaign, “Jabs Army”—the noble Baroness, Lady Fleet, is probably wishing she had thought of that as a headline for a campaign—reported that almost 12 million people had volunteered during the pandemic and that a third, 4.6 million, had done so for the first time. Jill Rutter, who led the Talk/together research, was quoted in its piece:

“With 4.6 million people volunteering for the first time and keen to do so again, there is massive potential to harness this positive legacy. You can achieve a lot with four million people helping out. We know that volunteering helps people feel more connected to their community and offers a chance to meet new people from different backgrounds too—so this surge in volunteering could help to build closer and more connected communities as we come out of lockdown.”


I say amen to that.

My final point is that, having been born and educated in the north-east of England, and having worked and represented left-behind communities there, I have seen that some of the most successful groups in transforming the life chances of our young people have been faith groups, churches, sports clubs and uniformed youth groups such as the Sea Cadets, Scouts, Brownies and Guides. We do not hear a great deal from them because they are too busy getting on with their work, and perhaps they do not have vast comms resources to do that, but there are almost 500,000 Scouts in the UK and 120,000 adults who volunteer with them. Brownies and Girl Guides account for a further 240,000.

Just as we must be careful that government funds do not crowd out private capital in our markets and economy, we should ensure that government schemes do not crowd out charitable initiatives and volunteering in our communities. We must maintain open spaces for our communities, to encourage people to volunteer and invest their time and money. This is not just because it tends to yield better returns but because—to paraphrase Shakespeare—it is twice blest: it blesses both the giver and the receiver alike.

This is an excellent Bill whose impact can be strengthened still further by focusing on levelling up in left-behind communities; having a bias towards children and young people, who have sacrificed so much; adding an opportunity for owners reunited with dormant assets to donate them to the scheme; and, most of all, having a programme to celebrate our outstanding volunteers, who care about their communities and seek only the opportunity to serve them. They are the engines of social capital and we cannot let such an incredible human asset remain dormant any longer.