Question to the HM Treasury:

To ask Her Majesty’s Government, further to the answer by Baroness Neville-Rolfe on 23 March (HL Deb, col 267), why clubs, societies and charities are barred from owning premium bonds.

National Savings and Investment (NS&I) consider a prize as unclaimed when it has not been paid or cashed in to the bond holder within 18 months of the prize being issued. NS&I proactively encourage customers to find funds and accounts they have lost track of. They do this in a number of ways, including regular media campaigns and their continued support for the My Lost Account service.

Since the first prize draw in July 1957, 364 million prizes have been awarded with a total value of £17.2 billion. To date, there are 1,353,438 unclaimed Premium Bonds prizes worth a total of £55.2 million, just over 0.3% of total prizes awarded.

The legislation under which Premium Bonds are offered states that Premium Bonds can only be purchased or held by an individual.

Changing this legislation to allow charities, clubs and societies to purchase Premium Bonds would have significant operational implications for NS&I. It would require systems to be put in place to allow multiple authorised signatories to each account and ensure that any instructions received come from authorised individuals. This would result in a large operational cost relative to the likely scale of deposits, and would therefore not be cost-effective for the taxpayer.