National Lottery Bill

There is an element of truth in that. However, the amount of money that goes to the top 500 charities from the lottery is proportionately less than the amount from other sources. If anything, lottery funding has traditionally favoured smaller charities. The hon. Gentleman is right that such charities have struggled. Having tried to fill in the forms myself, I know that it is a great burden, especially for charities without any professional staff who depend on the work of volunteers, so I am sympathetic to the point that he made. However, the causes that receive support from the lottery are small organisations that tackle difficult issues. In my constituency, for example, £136,000 was given to the Gloucestershire Aids Trust for carers’ support and respite care, and £5,000—a small but significant sum—was given to Cheltenham Open Door for the refurbishment of a drop-in centre for homeless people. People think of Cheltenham as posh and well off, but that is not the truth. The NLCB saw through the image and funded important work with the most deprived people in my constituency. Cheltenham Housing Aid Centre received £90,000 to back deposit funds for privately rented accommodation, and £178,000 was provided for an outreach service on domestic violence—a service which the hon. Member for Shipley would probably regard as politically correct. The hon. Member for Ludlow (Mr. Dunne) made an important point about esoteric heritage projects, for which it is equally difficult to find popular support. The independence of the NLCB and the other distributors means that they were prepared to fund that difficult work, and the Government should be proud of presiding over such grants. Many of those charities would never have been able to afford to use other kinds of fundraising that dominate the sector such as large-scale direct marketing campaigns, telephone fundraising or big pitches to corporate donors. The lottery has been a lifeline for them and it has done them proud. However, larger charities are worried about the proposal. As I have said, the cause of elderly people is one of the least popular. I used to fundraise for Help the Aged, which wrote to me today:"““I think the real issue is not that the idea of public involvement in itself is bad””—" I agree—"““but that we don’t really have confidence that you would ever be able to devise a system in which members of the public would really have all the information they needed to properly weigh up the different options.""There is a real risk that any system like this would end in some kind of glamour/popularity contest between charities, which would mean that charities would have to focus huge amounts of effort on presentation and on courting public favour, and that ultimately charities tackling some very worthwhile but complex or difficult issues would lose out.””" Those are the fears in the voluntary sector. I am sure that we all agree that public consultation is, in principle, a good thing, but the challenge for all parties working together, I hope, in Committee is to try to prove those fears wrong and to have a mechanism in the Bill that does not harm the smaller and less popular causes. The lottery has been a unique lifeline for many such organisations, and I hope that it will stay that way.