National Lottery: 20th Anniversary

Lord Addington Excerpts

Thursday 27th November 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Addington (LD)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness for bringing this subject to the House. It is a very appropriate one for us to discuss, particularly on this anniversary of two decades of the National Lottery.

When we cast our minds back, we should remember why we had a National Lottery: we were failing to fund important parts of our society and structure properly from the centre. Voluntary contributions were not doing it. Private contributions and sponsorship were not doing it. We had to do something else.

In this area, sport is the activity in which I have been most keenly involved. We had an infrastructure for sport at grass-roots level that was effectively falling apart. This is probably the most effective sticking-plaster, in government terms, you have ever seen. It has gone in there and become something solid. It has given a structure, support and point of reference that it is almost impossible to see us doing without, because finding government money to replace it is something we cannot see happening. I cannot see the Department for Education taking over those sports facilities and that structure which happened outside it, as it was supposed to do before and always failed to do. It never did enough, because there was always another priority that was that little bit politically sexier, which had to be done first. When sport was within the Department for Education, you suddenly discovered that its priority was a new literacy scheme. It usually got that wrong as well. However, the National Lottery came in and gave us a new pillar on which to build these things. The same is true of the arts and heritage.

We must never forget why we introduced the National Lottery. We brought it in to give a structural point whereby funding is generated by the general public, effectively on a voluntary basis, so that they will say, “This is for you”.

Having said that, the success stories that go with it are wonderful. Going back to sport, the improvement in funding for the elite level is almost unanswerable. That said, I say: change the way you fund sport, because you are not fair to team sports. I would also say: yes, you have succeeded; now, be brave and do something else. There will always be discussion about how we go forward with our heritage projects. Now there is greater awareness that we have enough stately homes and that we should also preserve industrial heritage. All this has proceeded from this great central fund. It is something we must do.

These become very short speeches if you just say, “Yes, it’s great”, and do not look to future problems. The noble Baroness, Lady Rawlings, is the not the first and she will not be the last person to speak about the introduction of the Health Lottery. My statement when I contributed a Starred Question in this House was to the effect that if it is not against the law, it is against the spirit of the law—something, I discovered, that has been said again. Can my noble friend give us some idea about what the Government are going to do to prevent, going with the Health Lottery, the sports lottery, the heritage lottery, the “Let’s pick up litter lottery”, using the same legislation and the same way forward? That is what we are worried about: the idea that this central pillar of funding that we have built and that we cannot see being done somewhere else, gets changed. If these lotteries are to come in, what responsibility will they have to the causes that are dependent on them? That is a very fair question. Will UK Sport be guaranteed the future funding it needs if we have another lottery that starts to hack into its funding stream? We must hear the answer to that. If the legislation needs to be changed we know how to do it—indeed, we are apt to change legislation rather too quickly. However, making sure that we have this guarantee of lines of progress is essential. If the Health Lottery is prepared to play ball, to become involved and to take on some of this responsibility, some of my objections start to be removed. If not, my objections start to grow. How are we going to bring this together?

Having dealt with that central point, will the Minister give me some reassurance about the eternal temptation for all Governments to cut the pie again and again, and to rebrand it? We have seen this in the past and there will always be a temptation to say that we should go on, saying, “We’re making quite a lot of money here, let’s put some more somewhere else”.

This is an argument that has gone on throughout the history of the lottery. I forget how many good causes there were supposed to be at first but then we stuck another one in. I think the noble Baroness was putting up five fingers but I cannot remember exactly how many there were at first. It becomes a blur. There has been a constant argument about how it is done and redistributed. What have the Government done to make sure that there is some consensus about what happens here? Unless we are all involved in that discussion, there may be a new and wonderful scheme that sounds terribly good, and for which you get a little applause, and then you realise that you have done damage to the other things. You will also have cut off the necessity for other bits of government and public funding to be channelled to do that job in the future. The National Lottery finds it difficult to give up a responsibility once it has had it. If my noble friend can give me some assurance on that, I would feel more comfortable.

We probably have, in the National Lottery, something that has done a good job, but I feel that there was an admission of failure when it came in to do that good job. What we can say to Camelot is, “That’s 20 years well done, but there’s no guarantee”. If we can make sure that the National Lottery, under whoever funds it, has this guarantee of funding from this one source, I will be slightly more comfortable. We must make sure that we, first, say what the responsibilities are in the future and, secondly, give an absolute assurance about the process of discussion and negotiation we will have before we expand the responsibilities of that type of funding. I would then feel much more comfortable on this subject.