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.

Telecommunications Infrastructure (Leasehold Property) Bill

Lord Bates Excerpts

Report stage & Report stage (Hansard) & Report stage (Hansard): House of Lords
Monday 29th June 2020 Lords Chamber

Amendment 5 withdrawn.

[The Deputy Speaker (Lord Bates) (Con)]

We now come to the group consisting of Amendment 6. I remind noble Lords that Members other than the mover and the Minister may speak only once, and that short questions of elucidation are discouraged. Anyone wishing to press this amendment to a Division should make that clear in the debate.

Amendment 6

Moved by

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Stevenson of Balmacara [V]]

My Lords, I am hopeful that we can be relatively brief with this, although I have noticed that the noble Lord, Lord Holmes of Richmond, has his name on the agenda, and I am sure that he will want to say a little more on this than he did last time.

The amendment appeared originally in Committee, where it was discussed and received a positive response. I decided that, by and large, the issue had been dealt with. However, in subsequent conversations, both with officials and with the Minister, there was a suggestion that the amendment had perhaps more legs left in it than I thought. Therefore, I decided to bring it back.

The amendment makes a very straightforward suggestion that when one is dealing with telecoms operators, there should be no hangover between equipment that is sold by one operator and other operators that might wish to do so. This is about competition and supporting consumer rights. I beg to move.

[The Deputy Speaker]

Lord Livermore? No. I call Lord Holmes of Richmond.

[Lord Holmes of Richmond [V]]

My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Stevenson of Balmacara, for bringing this amendment back. He put his finger exactly on the competition issue on which I would like to question my noble friend the Minister. As a hangover from when telecoms were a utility, and as we have seen with other privatised utilities, there is the recurring issue of what happens when somebody seeks to exercise their right to change equipment. What they find is often in no sense what they expected. We saw it at the beginning of the smart meters rollout, in respect of which there are still issues, and in a series of other areas, whether energy or telecoms. Does my noble friend the Minister agree that this amendment goes to the heart of enabling competition in this area of telecoms, and that it is necessary to make that clear in the Bill?

[The Deputy Speaker]

I call the noble Lord, Lord Adonis. No? Then we come to the noble Lord, Lord Fox.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Clement-Jones]

As ever, my noble friend Lord Fox and the noble Lords, Lord Holmes and Lord Stevenson, have put their finger on the issues. I was going to ask the Minister how she thought the question of open radio access networks fitted into this picture, but I will not.

[The Deputy Speaker]

Let us see if we can get the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, back. No? In that case we will hear from the Minister.

[Baroness Barran]

My Lords, Amendment 6 raises the important issue of competition, about which I think we are all in agreement. Of course the Government think that no operator should be able to prevent another from providing their own service to potential customers living inside a building. We believe that the Bill already ensures that no one is locked into services provided by a single provider. It allows for subsequent operators to apply for and make use of Part 4A orders in the same block of flats, and regulatory measures are already in place to ensure that operators, whenever they install their equipment, not just in this scenario, do not do so in an anti-competitive manner.

I direct noble Lords’ attention to paragraph 27E(4) of the Bill and the terms that will accompany a Part 4A order. These terms set out how Part 4A orders are to be exercised—for example, the time of day that operators can carry out works and that they conform to health and safety standards. We have set out in the Bill the areas that those regulations must include. It has always been our intention that the terms of an agreement impose by a Part 4A order would set out that the operator must not install their equipment in such a way as to physically prevent others from installing their own.

However, as the noble Lord, Lord Fox, put it very elegantly, we aim to simplify the lives of consumers. In response to his remarks and those of my noble friend Lord Holmes, the noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones, and of course the noble Lord, Lord Stevenson, if it would reassure noble Lords then the Government would be willing to table an amendment to the Bill at Third Reading to that effect. We consider it fair to amend the Bill so that it is absolutely clear that these terms should include measures to ensure that an operator must not install their equipment in such an anti-competitive way. If the noble Lord, Lord Stevenson, is content with that approach, I ask that he withdraw his amendment.

Amendment 6 withdrawn.

[Lord Bates]

My Lords, we come to the group consisting of Amendment 7. I remind noble Lords that Members other than the mover and the Minister may speak only once, and that short questions of elucidation are discouraged. Anyone wishing to press an amendment to a Division should make that clear in debate.

Amendment 7

Moved by