Question to the Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport:

To ask the Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, how much funding was not allocated (a) to and (b) from the National Lottery distribution funds in each of the last 20 years.

National Lottery good cause funding is held in the National Lottery Distribution Fund (NLDF). This money is distributed by 12 distributing bodies at arm’s length from the Government. Each distributor receives a fixed percentage of the NLDF income as set out in legislation.

Distributors draw down from the NLDF on a weekly or monthly basis as their grant commitments fall due, and tend to hold a balance in the NLDF to cover future grant commitments. Information on historic NLDF balances can be found in the NLDF Annual Report and Accounts.

Information on National Lottery funding awards up to January 2018 can be found on the publicly available National Lottery grant database. We expect to update this database with grant information from January 2018 to March 2020 later this Spring.