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Dormant Bank and Building Society Accounts Bill [HL]

It is not surprising that the banks are not happy about giving up their dormant accounts because they pay no interest on them and earn interest elsewhere. It is a bit like the position of Swiss banks. A very large number of victims of the Holocaust deposited enormous sums with them, and it was very convenient for them to sit on that money and to have nobody asking for it back. It must be right that we put into the Bill the capacity to move on and take up other orphan assets—if orphan assets is the right description of what we mean—so that we do not have to come back and legislate all over again to move on to other areas when we have dealt with banks and building societies.