Clause 3
Dormant Bank and Building Society Accounts Bill [Lords]
11:15 am
Jeremy Browne (Shadow Chief Secretary To the Treasury, Treasury; Taunton, Liberal Democrat)
I beg to move amendment No. 2, in clause 3, page 3, line 11, leave out from ‘section’ to end of line 11 and insert
‘may not be made unless a draft of the regulations has been laid before, and approved by a resolution of, the House of Commons.’.
I will be brief. I declined to contribute to discussions on previous clauses because I thought that I would keep my powder dry for the point I make now. The £7 billion threshold is clearly controversial; a substantial body of opinion believes that there should be no threshold at all. So the amendment would require the Government to use a positive resolution if they wished to alter the threshold, rather than a negative resolution, which is the current arrangement.
Opposition parties routinely use this device in Committee to try to make the Government more accountable to Parliament, and perhaps there is something slightly ritualistic in the way that amendments are tabled to that effect. In this instance, however, a serious point is being made: it would not be appropriate—indeed, it would be a slight breach of faith—for the Government to alter the threshold in a way that substantially changed the legislation and the impact on small communities that would otherwise benefit, without proper reference to Parliament. That is the motivation behind amendment No. 2.
Unlike other amendments moved by Opposition parties, which the Government—by virtue of having the majority of members of the Committee—may wish to disregard, they might want to look more sympathetically on this proposal. Unless they have malign or hidden motives—I have no reason to believe that they have—I cannot understand why they would wish to reject the amendment.