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Dormant Bank and Building Society Accounts Bill [HL]

On that last point, I would be the very last person to argue in favour of a monopoly for a body other than Big. In fact, in the previous Committee I argued against Big being given a monopoly, which is the basis of my argument. If you take what essentially has been private money and put a large proportion of it in a position where it can be distributed for good causes, it is a mistake to give it all—in the Big scheme as opposed to the small scheme, the alternative scheme—to a monopoly distributor. The argument has been made that Big is well set up for that. But I think that I am right in saying that it assesses its grants of any size in only two offices, one in Birmingham and one in Newcastle. It does not have a whole range of regional offices to assess grant applications. They are centralised on the two big ones. There is a very strong case—I hope that the Minister will deal with it at some stage—for widening the ability of the Secretary of State to select distributors so that no one gets a monopoly. There might be half a dozen distributors. In that way, there would be much more diversity; accountability would be better because the public would be able to look and see who they thought was doing the best job. Competition is quite a good thing for us to espouse. I thought that it was, generally speaking, a consensus within the leading parties that competition was a good thing.