National Lottery: 20th Anniversary

Baroness Rawlings Excerpts

Thursday 27th November 2014 Lords Chamber

Asked by

[Baroness Rawlings]

To ask Her Majesty’s Government what assessment they have made of the impact of the National Lottery in the United Kingdom on its 20th anniversary.

[Baroness Rawlings (Con)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to return to a topic that I spoke on for the first time in your Lordships’ House 20 years ago. I am conscious of the wealth of expertise and knowledge that noble Lords bring to the subject, and I look forward to their contributions today.

The National Lottery has undoubtedly been a huge success, operated successfully by Camelot since its inception, making a tangible difference to organisations and communities across our country, protecting and enhancing our heritage, and supporting the arts and sport since it began in 1994. The fact that it exists and has had such a positive, enduring impact is down to the foresight and leadership of Sir John Major. In a recent article, Nigel Farndale compared Sir John to the Cosimo de’ Medici of our age. We all have reason to be very grateful to him.

The National Lottery’s record of success is impressive by anyone’s standards. With 28% of its take going to good causes, that has totalled more than £32 billion since 1994—a phenomenal sum. A few facts demonstrate the scale of that success: on average, each week, more than £33 million is raised for good causes; more than 450,000 individual awards have been made across the United Kingdom; £12.6 billion has been paid to the Exchequer in lottery duty; those who have benefited include 700 playing fields, 1,400 museums and galleries, more than 37,000 heritage projects, from grand ones such as Tate Modern to funding 90% of Great Britain’s Olympic 2012 medallists—and many more.

How has this changed society? We should not forget that what is now part of our national weekly life was not without controversy when the idea was advanced in the early 1990s. Many at the time argued that for several decades, we had had smaller lotteries. We also faced the risk of competition from European lotteries and that our National Lottery would change society. It has, but not in the negative way that many predicted. A piece in this week’s FT described it as possibly the most successful example of crowdfunding ever. I confess that for many years, I looked forward to a lottery ticket from Father Christmas in my stocking. We are given the opportunity to dream about what we might do if we won and, through millions of individual ticket purchases, as a society we have achieved a revolution in the funding of good causes.

With success come challenges. In a legitimate desire to broaden access, we must make sure that, in increasing appeal, we do not create a crude market price that does not fully capture the true, often intangible, value. The popularity and increasing awareness of the Heritage Lottery Fund, which will distribute £375 million next year, has also driven up the number and quality of bids, meaning that only 35% will be funded, compared to 70% in 2006.

The filling-out of an application can be a labour-intensive and costly business. I encourage all those bodies distributing money from the National Lottery to reflect on how they might make their membership and decision-making process more transparent, simpler and more user friendly, without losing rigour and financial assurance. Much of the success and popularity of the National Lottery has been down to the combination of a chance to win and dream, the fact that buying a ticket helps to fund good causes—not, I repeat, not, to its being a substitute for core spending on such things as education and roads—and to the simple fact that there is only one National Lottery.

I feel very strongly that the National Lottery should remain true to these founding principles, that it should remain the only true national lottery, and that, despite some of the changes made by the previous Government, it should hold true to the additionality principle. As the Heritage Lottery Fund and the Big Lottery Fund look towards future funding priorities, I counsel them to resist mission creep. With regard to society lotteries, perhaps more commonly seen as charity raffles, they can and should exist alongside the National Lottery, and they do fantastic work. However, I support the view of the Minister, who has acknowledged that careful consideration and wider consultation on this issue need to be undertaken.

Similarly, while I know that the scale of the National Lottery leads many to suggest it is invulnerable to competition, I feel that the Health Lottery has begun to blur boundaries. I am wary of the precedent it sets. My counsel is one of caution: considerable good is already being done by the National Lottery and charity raffles or lotteries, and we should avoid anything that could harm that.

I conclude by returning to my speech on 17 November 1994:

“The National Lottery is expected to provide huge additional resources for our national heritage, the arts, sport and charities. I agree with my noble friend Lord Rothschild who said recently that the National Lottery Act 1993 could easily overtake the National Heritage Act 1980 as being the most important piece of legislation in the heritage field since the Second World War. In boosting our arts, heritage and sport, we are underpinning our culture, which for most of us is the core of our identity and a source of security”.—[Official Report, 17/11/94; col. 64.]

I am proud that those words, spoken in hope in 1994, have been borne out. In an age when many people and groups seek to highlight those things that divide us as a country, we are reminded of the ability of culture and sport, our shared heritage, to transcend differences and bring us together, and that so much more unites us as a nation than divides us. The contribution of the National Lottery to that cause is something of which we, as a country, can and should be immensely proud. We must make certain that it continues for many decades to come.