National Lottery

The hon. Gentleman makes an excellent point. I continue to be a keen supporter of the Olympics because I believe that all parts of the United Kingdom will benefit in a variety of ways. However, this debate is about the lottery. I am delighted to follow the hon. Member for South-West Surrey (Mr. Hunt), who said that it was vital for the Government to keep their sticky little hands out of decisions about the lottery. I entirely agree. It is a pity, therefore, that in 2001 the Tories proposed extra lottery money for local authority-controlled museums and art galleries and, in the same year, £5 million more to protect British heritage overseas. In 2005, they proposed more lottery money for village halls and parish churches and, in their last manifesto, £750 million for their proposed club and school sports programme. Even their leader has been at it: in an interview in 2006, he suggested using the national lottery to fund his proposed national school leavers programme. They say one thing, but act rather differently. Liberal Democrats have always believed that it is vital to maintain the independence of lottery funding from Government, but we have always accepted that there will be exceptions to the rule. Four years ago, when the Government proposed that some money be taken from national lottery good causes to fund part of the Olympics, we, along with all the other major political parties, reluctantly agreed to it, because we believed that the benefits that would accrue in terms of sport, culture, heritage, regeneration and tourism far outweighed the disbenefit of the cuts to the good causes. We assumed that that would be the only time we would be asked to do that, but things have not worked out quite as we expected. Part of the package was the £750 million to be raised by new Olympics-related lottery gains. Of that money, more than half—59 per cent.—was to come not as new money from ticket sales but from cannibalisation, as it were, as people switched from the games that supported the traditional good causes. That would have meant a loss of about £450 million to the lottery good causes—but as the recent report by the National Audit Office pointed out, the cannibalisation rate is much higher, at 77 per cent. That means that even the first agreement to cut money from the lottery good causes has involved an additional, unexpected cut of some £135 million. I am not surprised that that figure has changed. I do not know if any other hon. Members have visited their local lottery distributors recently, but it is impossible to tell from the scratchcards whether they are supporting the Olympics or the traditional good causes. Only in very small print on the back of the cards, not visible to the people who buy them, does it say whether the money is going to the Olympics or to the other good causes. In the outlets that I have visited, a significantly higher proportion of cards were supporting the Olympics than the other good causes. I hope that the Secretary of State will see whether it is possible—I understand that there are difficulties to do with the International Olympic Committee—to make it clearer to those purchasing scratchcards which of the good causes, the Olympics or others, they are supporting. That cannibalisation will get even worse if we allow the money raised to go beyond £750 million, and we have asked the Secretary of State for an assurance that that figure is an absolute cap.