Deregulation Bill

My Lords, the noble Lord says that we do not know. We do know; this has been out to consultation several times. We also have the recent report of the Centre for Economics and Business Research, which, as he knows, was published in February this year and went into this subject in great detail. After carrying out a great deal of research, it made it absolutely clear that all the changes that have been made to society lotteries over the years and the ones that we are proposing today have absolutely no negative effect on National Lottery sales at all. What they can do and have done in the past is to expand the market overall, therefore actively improving National Lottery sales. The biggest increase in society lottery sales was in the past year, which also saw the biggest increase in National Lottery sales. Therefore the argument that he is proposing at the moment has been proven to be completely wrong.