National Lottery Bill

My Lords, as the noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones, indicated, we had an extensive debate on this in Committee, and I appreciate his concern that this paragraph could be interpreted as empowering lottery distributors with the opportunity to encourage people to gamble. That is not the intention behind the paragraph. The promotion of lottery games is the business of the lottery licence holder. The reason we have the paragraph is to make it clear without any doubt that lottery distributors have the power to encourage people to get involved in wider events that promote the lottery good causes and spending on them, such as National Lottery Day and the National Lottery awards. The National Lottery Day is not designed to encourage participation in the lottery—although I recall on two occasions the noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones, indicating that was how he conceived of it. It is not; it is designed as a way of making clear to the public the full range of the benefits of lottery good-cause funding. We know from our own research that the public believe that they should be much better informed about where National Lottery money has gone. There is a substantial task to be fulfilled in informing people about how they approach the lottery for causes which they would want to see possibly supported by it and they want reassurance that the very substantial sums involved are well spent. The public are very pleased when they hear not only where the lottery money has been spent but also the reasons behind the expenditure. I think that is because too often they get only the bad news from the media. They get such news when an easy headline is made about an apparent misdirection of lottery expenditure. We may be treated to that later this afternoon. We had that—the noble Viscount, Lord Astor, will not mind me chiding him gently on this point—when we were talking about funding for international expenditure. The only interest that the media managed to produce across this very wide range of international expenditure was for a tiny amount—a few thousand pounds—which was spent on an unsuccessful attempt to establish a guinea pig culture in a series of Peruvian villages. A fractional amount was spent on that project, to say nothing of it being a tiny amount of the overall expenditure on international matters.