National Lottery Bill

I support my noble friend Lord Astor. I think that we may have got some things out of proportion. If it were not for the creation of the Big Lottery Fund, the Wellcome Foundation would be the largest distributor of funds in the country—it handled more than £500 million last year. It seems that the big missing link since 1997 has been that, instead of building the partnership with the big distributing charities, the Government have gone down the line of saying, ““We know what to do with donor money better than the big distributing charities””. Little bit by little bit, they have turned those charities off; they are not comfortable with working with the lottery. When you add up all the money distributed by grant-making charities—the largest, as I say, being the Wellcome Foundation before the creation of the Big Lottery Fund—it is a formidable sum. If we were to follow my noble friend’s amendment, we would be going back to a position in which there was no government distribution fund that was the largest in the country. While we think about that, it amazes me that nobody, at any point in these debates, mentioned that the Chancellor is already taking 12 per cent out of the pot. I support the amendment.