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Dormant Bank and Building Society Accounts Bill [HL]

I am slightly confused by all this. I understood that the banks had the ultimate responsibility for finding the rightful owners of these accounts. We now seem to be suggesting that the reclaim fund will have the responsibility. I am sure that the reclaim fund would merely act at a later stage in the proceedings; people would come to it when they thought they had missed out. But it is not the job of the reclaim fund to go out and try to find the rightful owners. Surely that exercise will already have been done by the banks. On the question of security and people’s identities being protected, I would have thought that the same thing that covered the banks should cover the reclaim fund, rather than it having a special category. I am inclined to agree with the noble Lord, Lord Newby, that this smacks more of the public sector than the private sector. It would seem to be more of a quasi-private organisation.