National Lottery Bill

moved Amendment No. 7:"Page 6, leave out lines 6 to 8 and insert—" ““(   )   In exercising its duties under section 33, the Comptroller and Auditor General may make recommendations to the Secretary of State to issue an order subject to affirmative resolution by both Houses of Parliament providing for the money to be held for distribution by a different body specified in section 23 (without altering the purpose for which the money is allocated).”” The noble Lord said: It has been useful to hear the Minister’s first shot at a previous amendment; I hope to push him rather further in that respect. We have heard how the balances have gone down. The briefing from the Big Lottery Fund is interesting. Its balances have reduced considerably, but there is a big argument about whether balances should be held and, if so, how much they should be. The national heritage fund clearly has a rather different set of considerations and argues that it should hold higher balances than the other funds to plan for the future and for forward commitments. Nevertheless, progress has clearly been made on the financial management of those balances. We are rapidly falling into a pattern in Committee, as we sometimes do, whereby the Minister deploys the full range of ministerial assurances about unreasonable powers which the Government are taking in the Bill. Indeed, he is already doing so. We are already starting to talk about last-resort powers, and saying that these prescription clauses will not be used but will be very broad-brush indeed, and so on. The Minister has already admitted that these are new and strong powers, but his argument is all about how they will be used. This amendment addresses that point exactly, and the voluntary sector in particular strongly desires it. It would ensure that the National Audit Office, rather than the Secretary of State, determined whether lottery funding balances should be moved from one distributor to another or to another body altogether. The Explanatory Notes indicate that lottery funds would be reallocated under this clause—indeed, the Minister made exactly the same point—only, ““as a last resort in the event that a distributor was considered to have failed, signally, to reduce balances to a reasonable level and there were serious concerns about the ability of the distributor to act economically and effectively””. That is more or less what the Minister said. But in those circumstances, surely the National Audit Office is far better placed to make judgments about effectiveness, economy and financial management by a lottery distributor. It would also rule out the possibility of any such future decision deriving from political motives. The Government might want to enforce their own priorities in those circumstances—priorities that were not properly rooted in the needs of those distributors. The amendment would provide important reassurance for the voluntary and community sector. The Minister said that the issue was the effective use of money, which was why the reserve power was needed. Hear hear! But who will be a better judge of that than the National Audit Office? The National Campaign for the Arts put it rather well: ““The sanction of reallocating funds from a distributor should be used in cases of serious financial mismanagement. It should emphatically not be tied to any political pressure. As such, the NAO is the appropriate body to instigate the process of reallocation of funds””.