National Lottery Bill

By speaking at the tail end of this debate I have a major advantage in that I can agree with almost everything that noble Lords on both sides of the argument have said. I very much support the spirit of the amendment. It would be highly desirable to have a definition of additionality in the Bill, but it is a holy grail—in both 1993 and 1998 attempts were made to try to formulate an appropriate definition. Mr Caborn, as the noble Viscount pointed out, did himself no favours when he responded on the additionality argument. He made a series of different blusters. I would never accuse a Minister of that kind of language. It would be a ““lawyer’s paradise””; it would result in bureaucracy—there was a series of unconvincing reasons. The reason that appeared not to have been given was the difficulty of definition, which I would have thought should have been the first argument to be made. The strange thing about the issue is that at the higher level, as the noble Lord, Lord Smith, pointed out, we all agree that additionality was one of the founding principles of the National Lottery and if we left matters there, we would probably all be in wild agreement on that principle. But when you reach the second tier, the NCVO, for example, defines additionality as funding which is additional to that which is properly funded by government and not a substitute for it and that it should not be used to fund      essential services or government-inspired programmes. The noble Baroness, Lady Pitkeathley, pointed out that you can shift, and that the voluntary sector often paves the way for government funding, which creates its own set of difficulties. The Minister made a valiant attempt on Second Reading to define it in a broad way. He said:"““There is a very big difference between agreeing priorities and outcomes that align with government priorities and using lottery funding to substitute for government expenditure. We are not doing the latter””." He continued:"““Lottery money is not just for spending in areas where no government spending would ever take place. That would be an impossible situation. We expect the lottery to spend on top of things which government would normally fund””.—[Official Report, 6/2/06; col. 498.]" We probably agree with the first half of what the Minister said. In the second half he almost reaches the point of saying, ““If it isn’t in the budget for this year for a particular government department, then it is additional””. Such matters require careful teasing out, which illustrates the difficulties and why the amendment that we shall consider later might be preferable. It is extraordinary that even after 13 years we still do not have a working definition that is agreed by all parties—government, opposition and the voluntary sector. It is high time that we had some sort of definition and I very much hope that the distributors, by inserting in their annual reports what they believe to have been additional, will help to define matters—because each will need to consult with the others on how they describe it. The 60 per cent to 70 per cent rule mentioned by the noble Viscount, Lord Eccles, will be helpful in that regard and we may, in time, arrive at a working definition. For the moment, I would say ““Yes, in spirit””, but I am not sure that we are quite there.