Dormant Assets Bill [HL]

Lord Blunkett Excerpts

2nd reading
Wednesday 26th May 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Blunkett (Lab)]

My Lords, I very much look forward to the maiden speech of the noble Baroness, Lady Fleet. I already welcomed it last week, thinking that she was going to speak, so forgive me if I ensure that I do not miss it on this occasion.

I welcome strongly this small but important part of the legislative process, which expands availability of and access to these funds, as the Minister has explained so clearly. I pay tribute to all those who have played a part over the last 13 years in making this a successful venture, and to those who have worked with organisations such as the Youth Futures Foundation, as the Minister described, using the money to find ways to improve people’s lives.

First, I will say a word about the important contribution that the noble Lord, Lord Field of Birkenhead, made in originating this programme. As noble Lords will know, he has been seriously ill but I understand and hope that he is now well on the mend. If he is not watching this afternoon, perhaps he will read in Hansard that we send our very best wishes to him. He pressed very hard for this under the Blair and Brown Governments, and he will be very pleased indeed with the work being done on reclaimed assets and putting them to proper use. He will be disappointed, as am I, that we have not been able to raise greater funding to undertake this valuable work and to put to use money that, as described in the legislation, lies dormant.

When we talked about this in 2004-05, we anticipated that as much as £8 billion to £10 billion and beyond would be accessible. That has not proved to be the case, but this legislation enables us to raise additional funds up to £1 billion, as the Minister described. However, as the Association of British Insurers points out in its briefing, in excess of £2 billion could be available. That obviously depends on the successful outreach to those who have not claimed funds to which they are entitled. While I understand that the dashboard being developed in the insurance and pensions industry will take up that important task of reuniting people with their resources, it would still be a very significant and, I hope, a beneficial outcome if we can raise substantially more than the anticipated figures given this afternoon.

It is almost as if we are facing two ways. We want to ensure that we reunite people with their legitimate funds, particularly in the pensions and insurance industry, where the number of people who do not notify their change of address when they move is staggering. If the figures are correct, 4% of people have not given notice of the change after a number of years. No wonder difficulties arise in reaching out and finding them, although I hope that the Minister will briefly indicate that it will be possible, even with data protection, to encourage the use of other data platforms, including local government, to ascertain where people have moved to and therefore reunite them with their funds. That apart, the critical element here is being able to put to work the massive dormant resource that still exists. I still believe that it is much greater than the amounts that the ABI has talked about.

The Minister mentioned Big Society Capital. Its predecessor, which the right honourable Hazel Blears and I were involved in establishing with the then Chancellor, was designed, as has happened since, to ensure we use that capital literally to kick-start the development of social capital, and the ability of communities to develop their capacity not only to fend for themselves but to create new initiatives that build from the bottom rather than the top.

The National Council for Voluntary Organisations has suggested that there might be the development of a community wealth fund. I hope that we might look at the existing community foundations. For instance, South Yorkshire’s Community Foundation does an enormous amount of good in my area. Making resources available to it for grant giving and establishing social capital funding that would enable community organisations to develop, flourish and become self-sustainable would be an extremely good move. I would be very grateful for the Minister’s confirmation that her department would be prepared to look at that as part of the development and use of the NDPB.

We have made good progress with the lottery over the years. It is much more likely to reach out to the parts that the Government now describe as requiring levelling up. It has certainly been true that it was, as so much of our nation is, southern and London-centric for understandable reasons to do with capacity to put in bids. In the past—not so much currently—the complexity of the bidding process provided a barrier to those who were not familiar with it. I hope it will be possible to make that much easier, perhaps through community foundations.

This is something that we all agree with and support. Clause 29 offers the opportunity of consultation, which the Minister mentioned. Perhaps she will confirm that it will be built into, and be a critical part of, the process. It is important to establish that that is the case, because Ministers move on and departments get reconfigured.

If, from this afternoon, we can have even greater optimism about being able to put this money to use while reassuring people that, if they reappear, their investment and contribution will still be available to them, that would be very good. I also hope that, although we are widening the criteria for access, it will be possible to continue with the existing programming criteria, because so much has been done, particularly on financial inclusion. Many of us have been engaged over the years in promoting social inclusion, and in avoiding exploitation and the way that misuse of domestic credit—and worse—has exploited people in greatest need. The answer to that has to be education on financial matters in school. KickStart Money and the APPG have been doing a really good job, and so have those working in teaching citizenship, which covers financial inclusion and the economy, as well as personal, social and health education.

This afternoon we give a very warm welcome to this legislation, building on what already exists and empowering and freeing people to be part of the solution to the challenges they face in their lives by providing the resources, funding and capital to turn themselves and their communities around through self-help and building from the bottom. It is by civil action that we ensure that, whoever the Government of the day, people remain in a position to fend for themselves, to build for themselves and to be creative in building safe, clean, green and functioning communities.

Dormant Assets Bill [HL]

Lord Blunkett Excerpts

Committee stage
Wednesday 23rd June 2021 Grand Committee

In the meeting before Grand Committee, the Minister and her officials offered some assurance about how future changes to distribution rules might take place. I ask her to restate them so that they are on the public record and so that there can be clarity right across the sector about how the funds will operate. I commend our amendment and give notice that we support the others in the group.

[Lord Blunkett (Lab)]

My Lords, I am very pleased to have put my name behind Amendment 55, spoken to by the noble Lord, Lord Hodgson. I strongly support the presentation that he made this afternoon. His work on the charities report and in chairing the Select Committee on Citizenship and Civic Engagement were milestones in understanding the critical importance of civil society and an enabling state. The way in which he presented his case this afternoon reinforced the importance of communitarianism—of building from the bottom, and of engagement with and facilitating the ability of communities to work for themselves and those whom they serve.

In a moment, I will obviously wish to speak to Amendment 56A in my name, but I want to say a word or two first in support of the noble Lord, Lord Hodgson, and my noble friend Lord Bassam in terms of the possibility in future of building from local experiments and local development into a national community wealth fund, and the facilitation of that through the legislation so that it might happen organically. I am proud of the work done over the years by South Yorkshire’s Community Foundation, which has been able to distribute grants and support local initiatives. Greater funding and support for that kind of operation is where organic change can take place and where people can see not only the contribution made from the unclaimed assets fund but the contribution that they can make in small ways by adding to that and being part of the process of delivery. They see where the funds have gone, experience the benefit of them and then take forward those learning processes to build that enabling state at local level, reinforcing civil society and enabling people to make decisions for themselves. The case is overwhelming and the question is about how we should go forward. I hope that the noble Baroness will be able to indicate that on Report there will be a welcome for a facilitating clause, which will enable us to move forward on that.

On Amendment 56A, I commend the Kickstart money and those who have, over many years, fought for better financial education throughout the education service. Obviously, this applies to young people who reach 16 and are looking to their future. I remember, as Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, going around the country on a fact-finding and informing exercise on what needed to be done about the future of pensions and the pension age. We were picking up the report by Adair Turner—the noble Lord, Lord Turner—and looking at the extension of the working age. We looked at auto-enrolment, which took so many years to implement, having been agreed back in 2005, and the way in which young people should think about their future.

This was complemented by the then child trust fund, which we addressed in the House yesterday and is relevant here. It was designed to enable people to have a nest egg—a small amount of capital that they could engage in their own lives. What we are talking about here has a synergy, and it is important for us to understand how the capital asset divide is a major challenge for the future. If you inherit a house from grandparents, parents or an uncle or aunt in London, it is the equivalent of winning the lottery. If you live in rented accommodation in the north of Sheffield, Barnsley or elsewhere and have nothing to pass on to future generations, you will see the reinforcement of intergenerational disadvantage.

I hope that financial education will help in its own right but also with the wider debate on where we are going as a country. It is particularly important that this happens at primary level; at secondary level, there is at least PHSE and the emphasis that can be placed on the economic side of the financial learning exercise. In the citizenship curriculum, the wider issues can be addressed as well. In primary education, those two things, while relevant to the curriculum, are not taught in a specific or identifiable way and it is really important that we get it into primary education at a very early stage so that young people understand the importance of their part in managing their money and how the financial world works around them. The unclaimed assets fund could be of great benefit if we can get this right.

[Baroness Barker (LD)]

My Lords, I, too, was a member of the Select Committee on citizenship, but clearly I did not make as big an impression as the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett, or the noble Baroness, Lady Lister. I am very glad that I was, however, because it was one of those pieces of work from which one comes away having learned a great deal about a subject that one thought one already knew a lot about but where there was much more to learn.

One of the lessons that came to members of that committee quite forcefully, particularly from people in communities that felt they had been left behind, was the very low level of knowledge of how to participate in local democracy—simple things such as knowing how to be eligible to vote, for example. In part, that fuels what I shall say over the next few minutes. I do not object to community wealth funds; I have considered them over the past few years and they are undoubtedly well intentioned and beneficial. It is also undeniable that they would in some—perhaps most—cases provide assets to go with the aspirations of local people to own and control the assets, which they are already legally able to acquire under the challenge fund and with the assistance of organisations such as Locality and so on. That legal right is already there.

My question about this is: in general, is the addition of another entity that has to be governed, managed, staffed and accountable advisable? Is it an addition or will it be an unnecessary added complication? We have hundreds of local community groups that rely on the knowledge, skills and good will of people in those localities. What they very often lack is technical skills.

Here I will pick up some of the points made by the noble Lord, Lord Bassam of Brighton, about the National Lottery Community Fund. I go back a very long way. I remember the creation of that fund and the impact it had on the voluntary sector, which I worked in at that point. It is unarguable that the fund brought in resources that could not have been imagined before its creation for capital, sports and social programmes.

However, it has always been a puzzle to me how we enabled the National Lottery Community Fund to be created and to be the size and extent it is, yet we have never had a requirement that part of its money would go towards sustaining and developing the infrastructure of the charities and community groups that largely deliver its programmes. The National Lottery sits on top of the rest of the voluntary sector and requires it to deliver its agenda. It does not have an obligation to sustain it.

It is worth noting that the financial position of the voluntary sector is vastly different from how it was even 25 years ago. Many noble Lords will know that NCVO, together with Nottingham Trent University, is carrying out a tracking exercise on the impact of Covid on the voluntary sector. It is producing some really interesting results about the way levels of demand for local services are rising and the extent to which, in this last year and in the forthcoming year, the resources of those charities will be under significant strain. At least 30% of them expect that they will have run out of reserves and will go out of business. That is the overall position.

I will tell just one story. Quite a number of years ago, National Lottery funding was used to develop a series of healthy ageing centres. These were flagship programmes set up with five-year funding. The great thing about them was that they had to be innovative and dynamic. Therefore, they have to be free-standing and to bring in new partners. They therefore could not be set up and run by the existing local older people’s organisations. They ran very well and highly successfully. Then the five-year funding ended, at which point the remnants of their good programmes were all absorbed by the then-existing local Age Concerns and so on. I wonder whether, in setting up this kind of mechanism, we might not set people up for a similar kind of scenario.

Dormant Assets Bill [HL]

Lord Blunkett Excerpts

Consideration of Commons amendments
Wednesday 9th February 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bassam of Brighton (Lab)]

My Lords, I express the gratitude of the Labour Benches to the Government for the progress made on the Bill and the valuable update that the Minister has given us this afternoon. I am particularly pleased that the Government have brought back an amendment covering the dormant assets scheme, although I rather agree with the noble Baroness, Lady Barker, that it is a shame that it was watered down, particularly regarding community wealth funds.

When the Bill was in your Lordships’ House we were able to reach agreement over periodic reviews of the dormant assets scheme and subsequent reporting to Parliament, which will keep us abreast of how much has been raised and how those funds have been put to good use, which is valuable information for us. During its passage through the Commons, the Government outlined some of the options to be explored in the forthcoming consultation that the Minister referred to, including making a specific reference to community wealth funds. Like the noble Baroness, Lady Barker, I would have liked to have seen work beginning on that, but at least we have got it into the consultative framework.

For our part, we continue to believe that community wealth funds should have significant value in communities across the country, particularly in those areas underserved by other government schemes and/or third-sector organisations. I remain grateful to the noble Baronesses, Lady Kramer and Lady Barker, the noble Lord, Lord Hodgson, and the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Ely, who spoke in favour of the community wealth fund amendment on Report, as well as to the former Bishop of Newcastle, who I hope is now enjoying the first fruits of the early stages of her retirement.

[Lord Blunkett (Lab)]

Is this an appropriate moment to reflect on the roots of where we are today on dormant assets, and to put on record again the part played by Frank Field—the noble Lord, Lord Field—all those years ago in pressing to get this off the ground and to get the original legislation that we are now updating?

[Lord Bassam of Brighton (Lab)]

I am grateful to my noble friend for his support on that point.

We on our Benches look forward to the consultation in due course and hope that the department will continue to engage with proponents of community wealth funds. Such funds could play an interesting and, we think, valuable role in levelling up and empowering local communities seeking their own solutions to local problems, a feature of the White Paper that we very much endorse.

May I use this occasion to ask the Minister what the Government intend to do to ensure that we continue to widen the potential scope for unlocking other dormant assets? Here I am thinking of Oyster cards, proceeds from crime funds, unclaimed pensions and unused insurance. It is worth reminding ourselves that the independent commission report identified some £715 million from investments and wealth management, £550 million from the pensions and insurance sectors, £150 million from securities, and £140 million from banks and building societies. Unlocking that sort of wealth unlocks a lot of power and gives great potential for social benefit. These are not inconsiderable sums of money, and if put in the right place and adapted, used and adopted for levelling up, they could leverage in bigger sums still for the hard-pressed communities that we want to see levelled up in the next few years.

We are again grateful to the Government for what they have done in improving the Bill. Your Lordships’ House played a valuable and valid part in that process. We are slightly underwhelmed by what has come back, but we are extremely grateful.