My Lords, I was not expecting a different answer but that does not mean that I am not disappointed. As I said when I moved my amendment, I have been down this track before and I have heard all those answers before.
The noble Lord on the opposition Front Bench was talking about a detailed examination. That is a good thing to do, which is why the Government commissioned the Budd report before the 2005 Act. That, of course, came out in favour of this level of deregulation. The report of the joint scrutiny committee on the draft Bill in 2004 said that we should remove these regulations. My noble friend has just referred to the upcoming report of the DCMS Select Committee. Of course, he may wait for that but if he was to look at the previous DCMS Select Committee report on society lotteries, it, too, recommended that these regulations should be removed. The two most recent government consultations recommended that they should be removed. Indeed, fascinatingly, 350 organisations and individuals responded to the Government’s most recent consultation on society lotteries, and 349 of them were in favour of deregulation. One organisation was opposed to deregulation and that, amazingly enough, was Camelot.
What is proposed here is not, as the noble Lord said, an alteration of the principle. There is no alteration of the principle at all here. The first section of the National Lottery Act says there is only one national lottery. That is entirely true. The Health Lottery is not a national lottery. The People’s Postcode Lottery is not a national lottery. Collectively, those two enormous organisations, and the 440 or so other organisations that run lotteries in this country, still have less than 5% of the market. The National Lottery, quite rightly, has 96% of the market. How on earth can that be seen to be a threat? There is an idea that Tesco or Sainsbury might suddenly launch a society lottery. Actually, they tried, but even they, with their massive marketing might, could not take on the might of a 96% monopoly operator.
The principle is odd because, as the Committee will know, Britain and France are the only two countries that have monopoly national lotteries. In America they are state lotteries; in South America they are primary, secondary, tertiary and charity lotteries; in eastern Europe, which invented lotteries, they have provincial, state and national lotteries and even smaller ones; in Germany they are state lotteries; in Ireland and Spain there are three—need I go on? The way that
the national lotteries are set up in Britain and France is virtually unique; no one else does it like that. It is recognised in most other parts of the world that secondary, tertiary and charity lotteries actually increase the size of the market, as the noble Lord, Lord Rooker, suggested, and everyone benefits. That is why, I repeat, when the Health Lottery started last year or the year before, it was the best ever year for the National Lottery.
I dare say that we will have the consultation, we will all take part in it, it will come up with exactly the same answer as the previous consultations and the Government will seek to damage it to defend their own monopoly, which they do not need to do. More importantly, they will do the most extraordinary thing: they will maintain the regulation that prevents charities from increasing the funds that they can raise. I know of no other piece of law, in this country or anywhere else in the world, whereby a Government prevent charities from raising funds for their own charitable causes. It is a pity, but no doubt we will return to this at a later stage in the Bill. In the mean time, I beg leave to withdraw my amendment.