National Lottery Bill

While I have some sympathy with those remarks, I made it clear earlier that the grants from the national lottery have been of enormous benefit to many communities. Some 200,000 grants have been made, including to projects in my constituency. The amounts of money may be comparatively small, but the benefit is enormous and the impact on the communities has been tremendous. Let us not belittle the importance of lottery money. We need to get the process for making decisions on how that money is spent right and ensure that it is separate from the Government’s decisions. We have to have a clear independence of lottery distribution decisions from Government. That is what the new clause is about.