Building Societies Act 1986 (Amendment) Act 2024

Overview of the Act

Reproduced verbatim from the Explanatory Notes published with the Act on legislation.gov.uk (Crown Copyright, Open Government Licence v3.0). Explanatory Notes are prepared by the responsible government department and are not part of the Act.

This Act is about putting building societies on a more level playing field with other retail deposit-takers (i.e. banks) in relation to their capital raising and corporate governance requirements, so that they can compete more effectively in the financial services sector and better support their members. This Act helps to deliver key asks from the building society sector. This Act thus amends the Building Societies Act 1986 ("the 1986 Act") and also provides HM Treasury with the powers to make specific secondary legislation.

To enable this, the Act makes provisions in three areas: Funds that can be disregarded by a building society for the purpose of calculating its wholesale funding limit; Real-time virtual member participation in building society meetings; and The execution of deeds and other documents.

The aim is to support building societies to grow, scale and compete with retail banks, creating competition in the UK financial services sector.