National Lottery Bill

My Lords, the noble Viscount will realise that I was waxing rather more happily about the problems of Peruvian guinea pigs than about expenditure on Manchester United. It is an illustration of bad news driving out good—an all-too-frequent experience, as we all know. Quite frankly, 3 per cent of the money which the regional sports board is spending in the north-west was directed to that project, so we are talking about some fairly minimal amounts. Sport England, not the Government, was responsible for that decision. I must say that the Opposition have used most of our debates at all stages of the Bill to tell the Government to stay out of these matters. It is a little ill for the Government to have to respond to a decision about Manchester United, which is always highly newsworthy. The intention was of course that employees should benefit from the drive towards an improvement in the health and fitness of employees at work—objectives that I think we would all share. The problem is clearly whether lottery money should be spent on the employees of a company that should be able to provide for such an improvement in abundance. That is an entirely legitimate question, although it was not legitimately addressed to me for the reasons that I just gave. It has caused some reasonable concern, but I simply want to put it into context. Other employers, of course, are not as extraordinarily endowed as Manchester United. The project was to get employers involved in an area in which a very large number are shamefully neglectful. The criteria required the employers to make a submission. It might have been said subsequently that the criteria should have included the kind of resources commanded by the employers, but in fact they covered the numbers of people involved, their participation in such programmes and what would be done with the money. Manchester United made a convincing case. Sport England has assured us—and we have looked into this as a consequence of this discussion—that all 41 awards were made according to the relative merits of the applications received, and that the prominence of the applicants had nothing to do with the decisions. The noble Viscount may be asking why the Government did not intervene in a matter of public concern, but I am sure he would recognise that that would not be our line.