National Lottery Bill

I have watched the Minister with the keenest interest throughout the proceedings today. The noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones—who I shall go back to calling by his proper name, rather than the one I invented in our last session—has referred to the manner in which the Minister defends himself. He avoids a single false stroke; there is not the possibility of a catch anywhere. It is a totally defensive innings, playing for a draw on the last day of the test. I use the analogy because I know the Minister’s enthusiasms. We are straight back to Trevor Bailey and Willie Watson in 1953. It now becomes a matter of curiosity for the balance of a Committee stage to see whether we can elicit a false stroke from the Minister at any point, or whether we will have a dead bat throughout. It is in absolute contrast to the performance of the noble and learned Lord the Lord Chancellor during the Terrorism Bill. Each time, when he tried to argue the Opposition off their latest amendment, he would warmly congratulate them on everything they had done to improve the Bill up to that moment. Thus he was retrospectively hitting his wicket, because he had previously spent the whole of that amendment explaining why it was wrong and the Government were right. But that is by the by. I admire the style with which the Minister does it. Like my noble friend Lord Astor, I go back to 1993, when we put into the then Bill five allocations of 20 per cent, with reasonable confidence that, to coin a phrase, nobody would wish to upset the applecart by changing their own percentage upwards, for fear that somebody else might change it downwards. Those five allocations of 20 per cent each lasted right through to the 1997 general election. As I recall, however, we gave an assurance during the passage of the Bill that we would be entirely happy to have a one-day debate, if necessary on an annual basis, to give Parliament the opportunity of discussing whether to change the percentages. My recollection is that we put in secondary legislation so that, if that were to be the case, we could then bring in a prompt reallocation of the amounts. In the event, that never occurred—perhaps because people did not want to upset the applecart. My enthusiasm for what my noble friend is doing is that he is taking us back to the schema of 1993–97, and giving Parliament the opportunity to express a view on whether the allocations are right. The present Government did something quite different in 1997. They did not throw it open to a general debate in Parliament; they went out with a consultation exercise to which 600 people responded, 540 of whom—or 90 per cent—were producer interests who were extremely enthusiastic about the distribution being broadened to include them, when they had previously not been. But that is by the by; it is yesterday’s battle. My one bone of contention with my noble friend is on moving to 25 per cent each. I should say that we did specifically say that the Millennium Commission, whose 20 per cent we recognise, was going to drop out at some stage once the millennium had been reached. That gave us a particular opportunity to cope with another issue the opposition raised constantly during the passage of the Bill: that the charities figure might be wrong, and that the 20 per cent that charities were going to get might be a reduction on what they would have received if the lottery Bill had not been enacted. At that stage we had only one other working example in any way analogous to ourselves. That was the Irish lottery, which had existed for a year or 18 months, and was not a particularly good analogy. But, as we said, we had the flexibility when the Millennium Commission went, to increase the amount going to charities if it was proven that they should receive more. There was not an absolute certainty that we would end up with the particular percentages that my noble friend has chosen but I salute him for having given Parliament the opportunity to have this debate and to hear what the Minister has to say.