Dormant Assets Bill [HL]

Lord Hodgson of Astley Abbotts Excerpts

Committee stage
Monday 21st June 2021 Grand Committee

[Baroness Barker (LD)]

My Lords, following our Second Reading, I went away and reflected on the way in which the Bill has been received and debated in your Lordships’ House. It would be fair to say that noble Lords as a whole wish to be supportive of the Government in what they are trying to do in the Bill. However, from a number of different perspectives, we all have questions about the effectiveness and efficiency of this method of doing things.

In particular, I tabled my Amendment 63 to make the point that nowhere in this Bill, or in its predecessor, is there an explicit statement about what these assets are supposed to be used to achieve. If we do not know what the objectives are, it is difficult to measure either the effectiveness or the efficiency with which the vehicle that has been constructed is doing that. It therefore seems that we as a House have an obligation to look at the reporting mechanisms that already exist. There are many of them in different places. They are all bits and pieces that you have to go and look at in, for example, the National Lottery Community Fund reports or the Reclaim Fund Ltd reports. Much of the detail of income and expenditure is in those reports, but there is very little in any of them on what has happened in terms of the impact.

My understanding is that the fund exists to use dormant assets not just because they happen to be there but for specific purposes of financial inclusion and developing financial literacy, particularly within poorer communities. That is what I really want us to try to have. When the Minister introduced the Bill at Second Reading, I was very struck when she said to us that the main impetus behind it coming to us was from the financial services industry, which wishes to see more dormant assets being used. That is fine—I absolutely agree with that—but to what end, and is the expenditure on this being done properly?

Noble Lords have to understand that the charitable sector is in a seriously bad way. A year ago, the Government asked the charitable sector what it thought the impact of Covid would be. In the initial lockdown, it thought that it would lose £4 billion. We have been through three lockdowns since that one. The government funds released to the sector in response to that figure of £4 billion were £750 million, of which £150 million came from bringing forward some of the dormant assets referred to in the Bill. The whole of the charitable sector is going to experience severe problems. It is every part of it, from Cancer Research UK already having to delay some of its projected work for the next five years through to the small neighbourhood organisations.

It is therefore extremely important that these assets be used for the express purpose for which they have been given and used as effectively as possible. We must also be able to work out from all the reporting that we do get to see that the principle of additionality is being adhered to: that these are funds for a specific reason, and that they are largely treated as one-off and not as ongoing revenue, particularly when government comes to talk about its overall response to the charitable sector.

My amendment was in part a nod to the Public Accounts Committee’s report of 9 June, in which it came up with its analysis of the Government’s response to the charitable sector and Covid. I understand that that report relates not just to the £150 million of dormant assets funding but to the £750 million. Nevertheless, the PAC raised significant questions in it, not least about the National Lottery Community Fund being able to provide sufficient data about what is happening with the distribution of some of its funds to poorer communities. Similarly, the report raised questions with the Charity Commission and the Government about the ongoing viability of charities, which are sometimes involved in quite essential charitable work.

For all those reasons, I came up with my amendment. I am agnostic on the length of time to be taken. I do not think that, for a programme of this kind, it is worth doing reports of anything under three years, because I do not think that you can generate significant data in fewer than three years, but we should have reports that are something more than a succession of different sets of accounts and annual statements for the different bodies responsible for the collection or the distribution of money, and we should look at whether this will continue to be the best way to deal with this issue. That is my amendment.

[Lord Hodgson of Astley Abbotts (Con)]

My Lords, the noble Baroness, Lady Barker, made a very important point about impact. I will come back to it in a moment in my remarks.

In the first instance, we heard from the noble Lord, Lord Bassam of Brighton, and the noble and learned Lord, Lord Etherton, about the timing of reviews to look at whether the structure is working effectively now and will work effectively at some date in the future. I want to probe the Minister a little further about the situation now and the current operation of the system. Specifically, I want to ask her whether the Government think that the existing powers to investigate, measure and check are sufficient.

As I understand it—I stand to be corrected—under the present system, money from the fund is passed to recipient bodies or recipient groups by what are called distributors, which have clear responsibilities to decide which bodies are worthy of funding and should get the money, and, after the funds have been passed over, to ensure that the proceeds are spent properly, effectively and in accordance with the way envisaged at the time of the grant. Again, as I understand it, there are currently four distributors: Big Society Capital, Access, Fair4All Finance and the Youth Futures Foundation.

The work of these four distributors is overseen by the Oversight Trust, which has no power to determine where the money goes but is charged with ensuring that the distributors have effective procedures in place to ensure good governance and proper performance of their duties. Clearly, the Oversight Trust has a very important role to play in maintaining public trust and confidence in the dormant assets scheme.

Can my noble friend enlighten me on three points? First, can a new distributor be appointed or dis-appointed? Who decides that and initiates it? If a decision is made to go ahead, what powers, if any, does the Oversight Trust, which is responsible for monitoring that body, have in making that final decision? That is my first question: can we remove or add distributors? How do we do it? What role does the Oversight Trust have in that process?

Secondly, and more generally, are the Government satisfied that the Oversight Trust has the powers necessary to fulfil this important role? For example, are distributors required or obliged to collaborate and co-operate with the Oversight Trust to ensure that it performs its duties effectively?

Thirdly—this point was made by the noble Baroness, Lady Barker—what role, if any, does the Oversight Trust have in measuring the impact of what the distributors are doing? Do we look in any way at whether the distribution policy being followed by one of the four groups now in power to do this makes sense for our society, or are they free as a bird? It would be helpful if the Minister could say a little about that.

Finally, it must be of importance, as we begin to see the expansion of the whole scheme—I think every Member of your Lordships’ House thinks that it is a good idea in principle; I certainly do—to ensure that the governance structure is adequate for the increased responsibilities that will be placed on it. I hope that my noble friend the Minister will be able to reassure me on these points when she replies to the debate.

[Baroness Noakes (Con)]

My Lords, Amendment 45 in this group is in my name. As has already been pointed out, it differs from the other amendments in the group, which call for reports, as it is a targeted amendment focused on ensuring that the scope for new asset classes being added to the dormant assets arrangements under the Bill is kept under review. The other amendments are broader and seek reports on the impact and operation of the scheme. I do not support littering legislation with reports on the impact of Bills—that is what the post-legislative scrutiny process is for—so I do not support the other amendments in the group.

I was going to point out to the noble and learned Lord, Lord Etherton, that his amendment is ineffective because Clause 31 deletes Section 14 from the 2008 Act, but he got there first. I would just explain that Section 14 was put in in the very specific context of the first Bill, the then Dormant Bank and Building Society Accounts Bill. At the time, there was considerable controversy about whether a voluntary scheme would work. There was much scepticism about whether banks and building societies would yield their assets, which is why that specific reporting section was put into the 2008 Act. It reported within a few years. It has been some time since I looked at that report but, broadly, it concluded that it had been effective. Not absolutely every bank and building society is in the scheme but, in terms of value, substantially the whole amount are.

I focused my amendment on bringing in other asset classes because it took a long time for this Bill to come forward after the 2008 Act. It was 13 years before more asset classes appeared, which is just too long. Indeed, my noble friend the Minister admitted as such at Second Reading when she said that the industry had been “nudging”—a polite term—the Government to get on and get this Bill done. I do not think that we can necessarily rely on the Government to prioritise or be proactive about the source of new funds coming into dormant assets, which is why I suggested a periodic report specifically on asset classes to keep up that pressure.

When the Dormant Assets Commission, which was set up to be independent of government, reported about four years ago it identified a number of additional assets. It decided to concentrate on the financial services sector, but even within that it noted, as we discussed at Second Reading, that a number of sources of assets in the financial services sector have not yet been brought within the scheme’s scope. The report also outlined a long list of assets outside the financial services sector, ranging from Oyster cards—I was astonished to find that there are 42 million cards with a balance on that have not been used for more than a year—to a large amount of money in unclaimed gambling winnings, which I find surprising. There are also lots of balances on things such as telephone accounts and energy accounts. There are lots of forms of dormant assets hanging around; they ought not to be retained by the companies that hold them but ought to be released for the kind of good works that are fostered by this Bill and the 2008 Act.

I hope that one day the Treasury will be shamed into no longer being the only body keeping its dormant assets out of the scheme, in the form of National Savings & Investments accounts. I believe it amounts to something close to state larceny for the Treasury to insist that it can keep dormant National Savings & Investments money because it has been used to fund public expenditure. It is not the Treasury’s money to keep. However, I acknowledge that shame is not something generally found in the Treasury, so we may have to wait a very long time to see those assets come within the scheme.