National Lottery Bill

The point that I was making was a simple one. If the Minister would listen to the whole argument, he might understand it better. The Bill does two things—it allows for the redistribution of interest, as the Minister said, but it also allows for the movement of balances from one distributor to another. The Government could therefore require that money held by the Heritage Lottery Fund for works on a heritage site be assigned to the Big Lottery Fund to distribute. The Minister has suggested that the money could be distributed for heritage purposes, but it can be moved to a different distributor for allocation. As I said in my intervention on the Minister, the whole point of the Heritage Lottery Fund is that it has been set aside for particular projects, so there is little point in moving funds from one distributor to another unless the intention is that the balances should be spent differently. If that is the case, who will tell the heritage project that comes to ask for its money that it cannot have it because the Government have decided that someone else should distribute it? It is evident from the Bill that the Government have failed to understand what is needed to breathe new life into the lottery and to secure the resources for good causes into the future. The spin from the Government is that the public will have a greater say in where the money goes. Indeed, as I said in response to an intervention, that is something for which we argued in our manifesto at the general election. In recent weeks, we have seen the new ““big idea”” to restore support for the lottery. The people’s millions project will give the public a chance to vote for good causes that they see on ““Coronation Street”” or ““GMTV””. The Secretary of State said it was"““a big say in how lottery money is spent””." Since its inception, the national lottery has donated more than £16 billion to good causes. The people’s millions project totalled £66.5 million. That equates to little more than 1 per cent. of lottery grants in any one year. This is not a big say; it is a big con. We want to restore the public’s faith in the lottery by giving them a greater say in how money is spent. Public confidence has been undermined by the Government’s misuse of lottery funds and by the politically correct awarding of grants. It is time to take the Chancellor’s hand out of the lottery till. If the Bill becomes law, we will be establishing not the people’s lottery, but the Secretary of State’s lottery. That is why we tabled the reasoned amendment. I urge my colleagues and all those in the House who want lottery funding to continue to go to good causes to support it.