Policy paper

Dormant Assets Commission: final report to government

Tackling Dormant Assets: recommendations to benefit consumers and society

From:
Department for Culture, Media and Sport, Independent Dormant Assets Commission , and Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport
Published
3 March 2017

Documents

Commission on Dormant Assets Report 2017

PDF, 785 KB, 108 pages

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Details

The Chair of the independent Dormant Assets Commission, Nick O’Donohoe, has today announced the publication of the Commission’s report. The Commission was tasked with considering whether the current dormant assets scheme, which only covers bank and building society accounts, could be expanded to include other types of assets.

The Commission’s report estimates there to be £1 - 2bn of additional funding potentially available for the benefit of good causes from the inclusion of additional types of asset in an expanded dormant assets scheme.

The Commission’s review, conducted over the past 12 months, concludes that:

  • there are potentially very significant values of dormant assets that financial services firms have not, or have been unable to, reunite with customers;
  • as a result of this, the current dormant accounts scheme should be expanded to include a range of these new types of assets;
  • firms’ participation in an expanded scheme should continue to be voluntary as this has worked well with the current scheme;
  • the current delivery mechanism operating in the current scheme should be modified in order to deal with the new asset types; and
  • new legislation will need to be introduced to facilitate the expansion of the scheme.

The full report contains over 50 recommendations to build on the success of the current scheme and expand this to include a wider range of dormant assets.

Read the news release.

Published 3 March 2017

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