Dormant Assets Bill [HL]

Lord Patten Excerpts

2nd reading
Wednesday 26th May 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Patten (Con)]

Lots of barbs are sometimes chucked at the House of Lords from different directions, sometimes quite rightly, but there seems to be a consensus among most people when they say that at least it is a House of experts and that they should listen to the experts thrashing out these difficult issues. This debate this afternoon has shown absolutely that this Chamber is a Chamber of experts, with one exception, which is me in this particular area. No one can be more expert than my noble friend Lady Barran, and it is worth remembering just how expert the Minister is in this world of the voluntary sector and of charitable organisations, not from some grandstanding chairing of this or that charity but for setting one up and taking 12 years or more to build up SafeLives, a notable charity devoted to dissemination of more information about domestic violence and harassment. She was there at the workface, recruiting people and trying to scratch around and find money. We are very lucky to have her to lead us in this debate.

I welcome this Bill, which of course builds on a considerable consensus that has developed since the then Labour Administration back in 2008, much encouraged by my noble friend under the political skin, the noble Lord, Lord Field of Birkenhead—one of my parliamentary heroes, although not one of my political heroes. He did so much to get this going, as was said by the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett, who is not in his place. It is always good to see a consensus when it is there.

I have four issues that I would quickly like to raise. First, I greatly approve of the new flexible approach which this legislation wants to introduce to extend the areas where new dormant assets may lie—and may be undiscovered still—using secondary legislation, particularly in England, rather than waiting another 13 years for changes to be made, as we have had to since 2008. None the less, the pressure not to do something and not to shelve, to wait until we have a good selection of things to bring the new secondary legislation into play, must be resisted. One way in which to do that is to publish annually through some Ministerial Statement to both Houses the progress made in identifying new targets in shorthand for this secondary legislation to be applied to.

Secondly—this is not something that I have raised with the Minister before; it just came to me, as things sometimes do—I would like to see all online self-investment platforms included in this Bill. These sometimes hold very substantial amounts of client moneys and levy pretty chunky fees on them. I am told that, during the recent lockdown, the sector saw far more people investing in these platforms than before. I do not know whether they are covered or not—I will not start making a Committee stage speech—and this particular point could well be covered in Clauses 12 and 13, as they deal with client moneys. However, I would like my noble friend, perhaps today or at a later stage, to deal with a straightforward policy point: is it the policy of Her Majesty’s Government to embrace investment platforms and drag them into this legislation?

Thirdly, has my noble friend or her officials come across any notable reluctance on the part of potential new entrants to get involved? Of course, we cannot name and shame because dealing with dormant assets is a voluntary process, and we value the co-operation there has been in these voluntary schemes. However, I wonder whether more can be done to involve active consideration of dormant assets, using the framework of ESG—environmental, social and governance practices of all sorts—in the financial services world and its institutions. In other words, consideration of what we will do about dormant assets this year should be an automatic part not of box-ticking but of the checklist of good ESG policies.

Fourthly and lastly, I hope that, in this territory and the others, when money is realised and distributed by the different bodies, smaller, newer and sometimes innovative outfits will not be overlooked, provided they have strong governance.

It is good to see in the Bill all the provisions that have been set out as part of a full legislative process. It is also good to see this Chamber getting progressively fuller week by week; that is very heartening. We will see more debates with more people able to be here in—to use the Whips’ Office’s phrase—their physical presence, rather than the deathly presence of Zoom, with due respect to the people who cannot get here.

I suppose that we are now edging, little by little, towards a new normality, whatever that turns out to be. However, I know that at least one noble Lord has said that he does not think the new normal will turn into total normality until the Bishops’ Bar is no longer a dormant asset but is brought back into full use.