‘Almost half of UK adults confirmed they would not know how to find the details of a loved one’s total financial assets upon their death.’
Legal Futures website, 7th June 2021
In April 2018, the Civil Society website reported calculations made by an expert in unclaimed assets as saying that ‘there could be up to £200 billion lying dormant in UK banks which could be used for good causes if not claimed’.
Over the past decade, UK regulations for the treatment of dormant assets and their availability for charitable purposes have made a lot of progress but, if this expert’s estimate is anywhere near accurate, there's still a long way to go.
Listeners will be aware of our particular focus on unclaimed adult-owned Child Trust Funds (worth over £2 billion), and we will continue to place priority on that area because it affects the lives of so many disadvantaged young adults who should have access to their money. But assets remaining unclaimed by older folk, whether still owned by living people or left behind by people who have died, are much more substantial in overall value. It's difficult to find a comprehensive analysis, and we would welcome any suggestions as to how this could be obtained.
The UK Government offers a search facility for unclaimed assets of deceased people in partnership with Bona Vacantia, and their website explains that the estates of those who died before, or without, making a will are held in ‘trust’; if no heir is found, the estate ‘passes to the Crown’. Another free search facility designed to help people to find their own account(s) as well as deceased family members is https://www.mylostaccount.org.uk/ .
Why does this matter? Primarily because assets remaining unclaimed provide a major opportunity and should be put to use for inter-generational rebalancing, along with the £7 billion p.a. proceeds of Inheritance Tax and voluntary philanthropic grants.
In these days of swiftly falling birth rates, it's particularly important to look at how unclaimed assets, particularly those of people who have died, can enable inter-generational rebalancing. Families are, of course, keenly aware of the need to look at all forms of inheritance, not just monetary but also to value their heritage and to learn from the ancestral journey. But if there are no living descendants, or perhaps those links have been lost for younger generations, that inheritance, heritage and history is abruptly terminated.
This continuity will become all the more difficult to achieve in these days of electronic record-keeping. Whereas our ancestors maintained detailed physical records, including photograph albums, diaries and all kinds of logs, we store all our information in the electronic cloud, secured by passwords which make it inaccessible even to our nearest and dearest.
What happens when we die? The likes of Apple, Google and Microsoft are unaware of such an event, but they will be aware of our date of birth. I imagine that if records remain unvisited for so many years and the owner is beyond a reasonable lifespan — say, 125 years — their electronic store will be permanently deleted, and that small part of history will be lost forever to future generations.
Monetary assets, however, will not suffer that fate: hence the dormant assets initiative. Meanwhile, financial institutions will continue to draw down substantial fee income, which can deter them from an activist role in moving money on; responsible financial institutions look beyond this to their wider interest, and organisations such as The Tracing Group provide the expertise and services to help them re-unite lost accounts.
That's why, following the passing into law of the Dormant Assets Act 2022, continual progress is needed to ensure that these funds are put to work for charity through structures like the Reclaim Fund, which can ensure that they are used to build inter-generational rebalancing for the future. Of course, it's not a simple process — for example, releasing cash from bank accounts is much easier than arranging the sale of quoted investments because, if a family were to ask for recompense for the latter, there's the question of who should bear the risk of asset price movement after sale.
However, regulatory oversight has to be the right way to take this forward: in contrast, I recall a meeting at the Financial Conduct Authority many years ago when we were discussing the theft of shareholdings from company registers following media publication of the owner's death. The FCA were arguing against registrar regulation on the basis that the criminal stock transfer was not the result of a monetary transaction; something which could never apply within custodial administration, which is properly regulated by law. I hope their view has changed now.
Preparation of this commentary has shown that there remains much to do in the field of dormant assets, but the potential opportunities for empowering young people thereby are substantial. If, however, you are concerned that your family might have missed out from the unclaimed assets of your ancestors, please follow the links to Government-established websites such as Bona Vacantia and Finders International. Another search facility which allows people to search for themselves as well as deceased family members is https://www.mylostaccount.org.uk/, set up following the first introduction of dormant accounts legislation and covering banks and building societies.
In the meantime, I hope the Office of National Statistics (in the UK) and OECD (internationally) will work hard to develop a full analysis of unclaimed dormant assets, ensuring that distinctions are drawn between ownership by living and deceased people, and showing the extent to which funds are drawn down by family, by Government, or simply left to generate fees for banking and other institutions.
We may not be able to take our money with us when we die, but we should at least be assured that it's going to be put to a good use.
Gavin Oldham OBE
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