National Lottery Bill

Well, I do not know whether the Minister is a member of the Magic Circle, but I felt that that was one of those ““Now you see it, now you don’t”” ministerial answers. On the one hand he was saying, ““Yes, we’ve got all the mechanisms set up. We have agreed that the distributors should report in this way and we have a common framework and a common interpretation. Yup, everything is in line””. I was half-expecting the Minister to add, ““Yes, there is no problem in enshrining that in primary legislation because the practical facts are straightforward and everything is in place””. Of course the sting was in the tail of his reply. His reasons for not enshrining this matter in primary legislation were extremely thin, compared with the concerns of the voluntary and community sector, which is extremely anxious to see that it is included. In fact, as the Minister knows full well, enshrining this in primary legislation would to a huge extent head off the steam behind the additionality argument. However, he lamely said, ““We are not going to put it in legislation, because you do not put in legislation what can be achieved by voluntary means””. Frankly, half of the Government’s legislation could be scrapped on the basis of saying, ““We will legislate unless you do this voluntarily””. The Minister said that it would not allow for flexibility—but that is all in the drafting. If the Minister feels that it is not sufficiently flexible, I am sure that forms of words could be found; but he did not provide an example. His third reason was that there was no commonality in every precise respect between all the lottery distributors. But that is not required. This amendment would not put them in a straitjacket as regards their reporting. There is no requirement that all the other lottery distributors should give, say, 60 per cent of their funding to the voluntary sector. The Minister has not made much of a case against reflecting in primary legislation what will clearly be the practice. Quite the contrary. The Minister has demonstrated how that can happen in practice, and he is clear that enshrining that in legislation would not be a considerable problem. In fact it would be entirely possible—