National Lottery

I shall come to that matter later in my speech. An impact assessment has been published to accompany the order. It is obviously slightly counterfactual, because one does not know what grants would have otherwise been made. I shall make some announcements later in my speech that I hope will reassure my hon. Friend. I shall try to finish the paragraph of my speech that I am currently in, as I have been on it for a while. The £1.085 billion is made up of £410 million, as previously confirmed, and an additional £675 million as announced in March 2007. We have been open about the fact that that will mean that there is less money for the lottery between 2009 and 2012, and of course we recognise that concerns have been expressed about that. I am keen to respond to them as strongly as I can. When my right hon. Friend the Minister for the Olympics announced this funding package, she agreed with the Mayor of London that lottery distributors would be repaid the additional £675 million from the profits arising from the sale of land in the Olympic park after the games. Hon. Members will have seen stories in the press this morning reporting pessimistic forecasts for growth in land values. The headline in this morning's story is highly misleading, because the Olympic budget does not rely on land sales—there is no black hole in the Olympic budget. What has been said—the Mayor said this as early as April last year—is that we have to make estimates about the increase in land values. The prudent basis on which the London Development Agency has always made its assumptions is that values would grow at the rate of 6 per cent. But the Mayor also said in April that, given past trends in growth, it was possible to estimate much higher growth, up to 19 or 20 per cent. We are therefore confident that we would be able to repay the lottery if those levels of growth were achieved, but that does not create a black hole in the funding and there is nothing new about the story in the papers today. Those figures have been in the public domain for some time.