National Lottery

Lord Kerr of Kinlochard Excerpts

Monday 16th July 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Kerr of Kinlochard (CB)]

I too declare an interest, as a former trustee of the National Gallery, and I now help a wonderful museum in Glasgow called the Burrell Collection, which is in receipt of generous support from the Heritage Lottery Fund. Quite right too—it is marvellous.

I am a huge supporter of the Heritage Lottery Fund, particularly now that, as the noble Baroness, Lady Andrews, said, it has spread its largesse. At the beginning it was maybe a little too fixated on metropolitan good causes, but now one sees good being done right across the country, and these days the selection processes are done extremely professionally. I am therefore a huge supporter. I am less of a supporter of the lottery. I am uneasy about this tax, which is the most regressive tax in the United Kingdom. It is regressive in the way it is collected, because not many high-income households buy lottery tickets, and in the way it is spent. That can be exaggerated, but the point is that not many low-income households go to Covent Garden. There is a potential problem here: the combination is a little perverse. The lottery takes money from people who are least able to afford it and spends a fair amount of it on the entertainments of those who could certainly afford them themselves.

I cannot help thinking that voluntary donations to the HLF, collected by HMRC through the tax system, would be a more satisfactory way of supporting the Heritage Lottery Fund and extremely good causes. If one financed it that way, it seems that it would be possible for the HLF to come into the scope of gift aid. It might also attract the attention of the Carnegies and Rockefellers of our day, as it clearly does good across the same sort of range of good causes that Andrew Carnegie supported in his time. Therefore, mine is a slightly cautionary note—the same note that the noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, struck. I cannot believe that it would be a wholly unalloyed good to have an all-out campaign to sell more lottery tickets, but to ensure that the HLF has more money to use would be an unalloyed good.