Clause 11
Dormant Bank and Building Society Accounts Bill [Lords]
12:15 pm
Jeremy Browne (Shadow Chief Secretary To the Treasury, Treasury; Taunton, Liberal Democrat)
The amendment would create a statutory obligation for banks to attempt to reunite dormant accounts with their owners. It amends the definition in subsection (1) by adding another paragraph to require the financial institution to have
“exhausted all reasonable efforts to inform the account holder of the funds that bank or building society holds on their behalf.”
That would ensure that financial institutions exercise appropriate responsibility towards account holders before transferring their money to a reclaim fund. The current system for allowing people to check whether they have dormant accounts centres around the website, www.mylostaccount.org.uk. That presupposes that the account holder knows which institutions their account is with and believes that they have a dormant account in the first place. It is also reliant on voluntary information from the institutions, which can be patchy, and on the account holder being able or willing to use a computer, which we should not assume will automatically be the case. I am not trying to undermine the Bill as a whole but to ensure that the interests of depositors are safeguarded to an even greater degree than it currently envisages by putting that greater obligation on the banks.