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

To ask the Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, what assessment she has made of the adequacy of the annual sales limit placed on charity lotteries.

The society lottery annual sales limit was last increased in July 2020 as part of a wider package of changes to society lottery limits.

DCMS published a review of the impact of these in March 2022. Early indicators are positive, for example the increase in the annual sales limit has allowed some multiple licensed operators who previously had annual sales in excess of £10 million, to take advantage of the new limit to restructure and become single licence holders, and use the cost savings in doing so to increase good cause returns. The review concluded that it is too soon to reach any firm view on the impact of the changes, especially during a time that the effect of the Covid pandemic made any evaluation more difficult, given changes in consumer behaviour over this period which may have had a distorting effect. We want to see more data on annual growth of the sector to fully measure their impact.

My officials will continue working with the Gambling Commission, as part of its regulatory role, to keep the sector under review.