National Lottery Bill

I am grateful to all noble Lords who have spoken in this debate. I am delighted that the Minister read our manifesto with such care; I have to admit that I did not read his with equal care. Anyway, this was a debate in the other place—I occasionally read the Hansard of the other place—so I am not going to go into it, because it was adequately answered. I recognise the difficulties of addressing the concept of additionality and putting it in legislation in some form. We will move on and make better progress in the consideration of the next amendments when we come to them. This has been what you might call a ““pre-debate”” on them. The Minister did not answer the question posed by my noble friend Lord Brooke of Sutton Mandeville on when the distributing bodies will have to report on additionality. Will it be their responsibility to make their own definitions, or will they have to take account of directions given by the Secretary of State, who has this additional new power, as the noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones, is constantly reminding us? It would be helpful—and the Minister can leave the answer until the next set of amendments—to know whether there is going to be any guidance to the distributing bodies, and how they are going to report on additionality. The Government are saying, ““We accept the principle, but cannot define it in legislation, so we are going to give it to them to report to us””. We need to know how that will work. Is the Secretary of State going to write to them and say, ““Please do this, and this is how we suggest you do it””? We will need to debate those issues. Perhaps, however, those questions are more germane to the reporting bit coming up in the next set of amendments. I remind the Committee that this has happened because the Government have created the Big Lottery Fund—which has 50 per cent of funds—and have given themselves so much power to prescribe what this distributing body will do. That is why we are concerned with additionality. We would not be having this debate if the original four good causes had remained; it would not have been necessary. I beg leave to withdraw the amendment. Amendment, by leave, withdrawn.