§ Mr. Richard Shepherdasked the Chancellor of the Exchequer whether the Chief Registrar of Friendly Societies has now considered the representations from the accountancy bodies and the Building Societies Association on the draft regulations amending the requirements for accounts and annual returns by building societies; and when these regulations will take effect.
§ Mr. Ian StewartYes. The Building Societies (Accounts and Annual Return) Regulations 1983 have been made by the Chief Registrar with the consent of the Treasury and have been laid before the House today.
The regulations do not make any fundamental changes. They are necessary to keep up-to-date the requirements for societies to make information available to their members, to the public and to the Registry. The regulations mainly affect the annual return. They in particular provide for recent developments such as the proliferation of new forms of share and deposit accounts, which require a new form of analysis if the return is to be comprehensible, the issue of certificates of deposit by building societies following the provisions of the Finance Act 1983, the change in the special advance limit to £60,000 from the beginning of 1983 for most societies, and the comments by the Chief Registrar in his recently published report on the creation of local boards by societies.
The Chief Registrar has taken account of points made by the accountancy bodies and the Building Societies Association in the informal consultations on the drafts. He is grateful for their prompt response, particularly as circumstances dictated only a short period for consultation. The regulations will apply to accounts and returns relating to accounting periods ending on or after 31 December 1983, but they include transitional provisions. Societies who wish may make more limited changes in certain parts of the return in respect of periods ending on or before 30 June 1984: this allows for the possibility that they may not have collected information during the year in a way which could readily be put into the new format. The Chief Registrar has also accepted that some of the additional information which is primarily required for his purposes could be commercially sensitive, and would therefore be more appropriate to be added to the existing confidential monitoring returns made to the Registry, rather than to the public annual return.