Lotteries: Limits on Prize Values

Amanda Milling Excerpts

Tuesday 12th December 2017 Westminster Hall

[Amanda Milling (Cannock Chase) (Con)]

It is a real pleasure to serve under your chairmanship this afternoon, Sir Edward. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for North West Norfolk (Sir Henry Bellingham) on securing this debate. I am particularly pleased because I have raised several questions in the House on this topic and have spent weeks applying for a debate myself. Between us we have managed to get there in the end. I am delighted to have the opportunity to talk about the reforms that have been discussed by hon. Friends and hon. Members this afternoon, and the opportunities that we could create for local charities and good causes.

To touch on some of the points that other Members have made, why is reform needed? What is the purpose of society lotteries? Put simply, society lotteries are one of several ways in which charities can raise all-important funds for good causes. As Members we go to many different events and support charities in many different ways. Society lotteries engage support in a slightly different way from other forms of fundraising. In fact, they are a way of recruiting supporters. They can find themselves getting new donors and also volunteers. Some charities that have society lotteries say that people buy lottery tickets and go on to take out direct debits and leave legacies. Society lotteries have become an increasingly successful way for charities and good causes to raise all-important funds at a time when we know that demands on their services are on the increase.

The numbers speak for themselves, as my hon. Friend the Member for North West Norfolk mentioned in his speech. In 2011, society lotteries raised around £100 million for good causes. They now raise more than £250 million. They have become a vital way in which well-known national charities can raise funds. My right hon. Friend the Member for Witham (Priti Patel) mentioned the British Legion, which runs the poppy lottery. There are also the more regional and local charities such as St Giles Hospice and the Midlands Air Ambulance in my area.

External lottery managers provide services to operate lotteries. The best known are the Health lottery and the People’s Postcode lottery. We can see the ways in which they help. The People’s Postcode lottery operates to help raise funds for local, national and international good causes, supporting 70 larger charities and 3,000 smaller charities and local community organisations. The Health lottery has raised around £100 million, helping 400,000 people and supporting 2,500 charities, including providing just over £25,000 to Media Climate CIC in my constituency to support a project called Get Active with Music, a two-year project that is looking to deliver a weekly media creation and learning project for a group of 30 adults with learning difficulties.

As both my hon. Friend the Member for North West Norfolk and my right hon. Friend the Member for Witham mentioned, such action is a good example of the big society. Before the general election in 2010, long before I entered this House, I conducted some market research to look at the concept of localism and the big society to try to understand how people understood it. The project is a really good example of exactly what the big society is and what it looks like on the ground in our individual constituencies.

In short, society lotteries provide invaluable funding for charities and good causes, particularly for small and local charities and good causes. Charitable need outstrips supply. Data from the People’s Postcode lottery shows an increasing gap between the funding applications received and the funds available to the three grant-giving society lotteries managed by them.

For some time there have been calls for changes and reform in the law. Society lotteries have been incredibly successful, but there is scope for them to do even more. My hon. Friend the Member for North West Norfolk outlined the limits on society lotteries, so I will not go into those in detail again. Needless to say, there is scope and a need to increase the limits and caps in order for society lotteries to fulfil their full potential. The reforms being sought, as he mentioned and which I fully support, are modest. The sector is calling not for caps to be removed completely, but simply for the draw and turnover limits to be increased and jackpot prizes increased to £1 million. In the case of the minimum charity contribution, there are calls for the rules to be changed so that it is aggregated over an extended period for newly created lotteries, recognising the additional start-up costs in the early years.

Reforming in such a way, as hon. Members have mentioned, it would enable a strong national lottery as well as a strong society lottery sector. They can both work together, maintaining their unique positons and their very different characteristics. My hon. Friend made the point, which I fully support, that they are different. There are different motivations for engaging with the national lottery and with a society lottery. The national lottery is about winning big, life-changing sums of money. Society lotteries are about contributing to good causes, with a small benefit of perhaps winning some money along the way.

As other hon. Members have mentioned, reform has been discussed for some time. Indeed, it was in 2012 that the Department for Culture, Media and Sport first announced that it intended to review society lotteries. Five years on, following a Select Committee inquiry, a review by the Gambling Commission and two general elections, we are still having the same discussion about when reform is likely. I raised the matter in departmental questions in the House last month, and I urge the Minister to come forward with plans to reform the law as hon. Members have outlined. I should specifically like to know what plans her Department has to reform society lottery law, and what timetable is being considered for implementation of reforms.