National Lottery Bill

moved Amendment No. 6:"Page 6, leave out lines 6 to 8." The noble Viscount said: Amendment No. 6 prevents any money being moved from the control of one distributor to another even if the purpose of the money is kept the same. The Government have maintained that this is a power only of last resort if a fund persistently does not reduce its balances. They put forward various ideas—either a new distributor would be set up or an existing body with expertise would be used to control some of the money. I had a meeting with the Minister to discuss this point. One of the suggestions put forward by his team was that if, for example, the Heritage Lottery Memorial Fund had not satisfactorily brought down its balances, another entity could be used to give the money away. I asked: Who? The answer was, ““Perhaps English Heritage””. Of course that does not work because you cannot be a distributor and a recipient. That is the difficulty for the Government. In effect, they would have to set up a new body; and that seems to me to be a mistake. They should make existing bodies work. As we have heard, these bodies have to take account of directions given by the Government. The idea of saying to the sport lobby, ““I am sorry, the arts one does not work, you can give that””, or vice-versa, does not work. It is unnecessary. If the Government really feel that any of the distributing bodies are not successful, they should come back to Parliament and say so. The Government have so many powers in the Bill to make the provisions work—by guidance, by direction and by prescription. Subsection (2) of new Section 29A is entirely unnecessary and, indeed, puts the distributing bodies under a threat that they should not be under. No existing bodies will have that expertise and setting up a new body would be worse. It would be much better to make the existing body work. Amendment No. 7 ensures that the balances of a distributing body are not reduced to the extent that it is unable to fulfil its commitments to ongoing projects. Often distributing bodies have long-term projects. It is important that they are able to consider that. I know the Minister agrees with that principle. We want to ensure that arbitrary targets are not imposed on the bodies which, in effect, damage some important commitments that they might wish to make and thereby damage the recipients of lottery funding. The Government have a duty to ensure that bodies that distribute lottery funds work. They should not have power to be able to swap the money around. They should certainly come back to Parliament through primary legislation if they wish to change the lottery in that fashion. That is the substance of my amendment. I beg to move.