National Lottery: 20th Anniversary

Lord Smith of Finsbury Excerpts

Thursday 27th November 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Smith of Finsbury (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, I should begin by declaring an interest as chairman of the Wordsworth Trust in Cumbria, which has been the recipient of a number of grants that were very handsomely and generously provided by the Heritage Lottery Fund. As the shadow Secretary of State, I was present 20 years ago at the Tower of London when the National Lottery was launched. I join heartily in the words of the noble Baroness, Lady Rawlings, whom I congratulate on choosing this topic for debate this afternoon, in her tribute to the former Prime Minister, John Major. I am not sure that he has all the attributes of Cosimo de’ Medici, but certainly, in conceiving and bringing to birth the National Lottery, he gave significant service to this country and I trust that it will be part of what history remembers him for with admiration.

Over those 20 years, the lottery has made an incalculable difference to our nation’s life: to arts, sport, charities, voluntary organisations, heritage, museums and the countryside. Here I shall differ, just for a moment, from the speech of the noble Lord, Lord Holmes. There was a change some 17 to 18 years ago in the number of causes supported by the National Lottery. That change was possible because so many more people were playing the lottery than had originally been anticipated, so the funds were there to enable an expansion in the range of good causes that it was possible to support, while not substituting—on this I absolutely agree with all the previous three speakers—the principle of additionality, which is that the lottery should not be supporting things that ought to be part of normal, government-supported activity. That is absolutely crucial. If we were able to extend the lottery into some areas related to fields of education, health and the environment, those were things that it was not possible to support by straightforward, direct government grant. That should always be at the heart of what the lottery is all about.

The way that the lottery was initially established did lead to one or two perversities in the early days. The first of those was a tendency to support buildings rather than people or activities. That has long since been put right. There is now a wide range of activities that the National Lottery supports, and rightly so. Indeed, applications now are looked at in the round, not just the capital construction work that is proposed but, alongside that, the activities that will be generated, the income that will come from that and the costs that will arise. The whole package is looked at and encouraged by the lottery distributors.

One of the other perversities that emerged in early days—and I think that we have not yet quite got this right—is that the process of applying for lottery funding, as the noble Baroness alluded to, can be difficult, complex and a hassle. For those who are not well advised, not well heeled and unused to putting in applications, that can make for problems. It is one of the reasons why some of the geographical distribution of lottery largesse has been a bit skewed in some parts of the country. When I was Secretary of State we tried to put that right by dreaming up what we called the “Brass for Barnsley” scheme. We earmarked a portion of funding that we said would go to Barnsley. We then assisted all the voluntary, charitable and third sector organisations in Barnsley to put in applications by making available facilitators and co-ordinators to ensure that they were able to put in the complex applications that were needed. The result was spectacular. A flow of applications for incredibly good schemes came forward and we were able to make sure that Barnsley got its fair share of lottery funding across all the various lottery distributors. We need more such schemes. We need to enable and facilitate organisations in some of the most deprived and worthy areas of this country to put in applications and to be successful in doing so.

As Secretary of State and chairman of the Millennium Commission, I was very proud to see many of the spectacularly successful projects that we have now in this country coming to fruition, whether it was the British Museum Great Court, the breathtaking Tate Modern or the Eden Project in Cornwall. But in some ways it was the smaller schemes, the little things and the individuals who were able to be helped that meant the most. All noble Lords who have contributed to the debate have mentioned the support for individual elite athletes and the dramatic impact that that has had on our performance in both the Olympic and Paralympic Games. I was very proud to help put that in place. It has made a huge difference. In addition to that, there is the transformation of village greens, church floodlighting, renovating village halls, putting church bells back into working order, ensuring that local Victorian parks can be restored to their former glory and rebuilding footpaths on highland mountains. One of my favourites is a little bit of what I like to think of as democratic socialism, smuggled past Tony Blair when he was not looking: the Scottish Land Fund, which has helped local communities in parts of the Highlands and Islands to purchase collectively their land, their crofts and their villages, and to make a huge success of running that.

The lottery has much to be proud of. It hardly seems to have been 20 years; but in the course of those years it has helped to transform Britain much for the better.