NATIONAL LOTTERY ANNUAL RESULTS

NEWS SPECIAL

LOTTERY RETAILERS HELP DELIVER £200M BOOST TO GOOD CAUSES

NATIONAL LOTTERY RETAILER ACROSS THE UK HELPED GROW SALES LAST YEAR BY 9.7% WHICHRESULTED IN AN EXTRA £200M GOING TO GOOD CAUSES.

The phenomenal efforts of National Lottery retailers across the last year has resulted in a huge 12% increase in the amount of money going to good causes. The great news came as Camelot announced its third successive year of sales growth. Retailers helped grow sales by almost £700m in the year to the end of March, reaching a record total of £7,905.1m.

Over the same period, the National Lottery generated returns to Good Causes of £1,853.1, an

increase of £198.4m (+12%), which is even more significant at this critical time as National Lottery Distributors continue to fund vital work across the UK.

This commitment will see up to £600m of National Lottery funding being directed towards UK charities and organisations to help tackle the impact of COVID-19.

Camelot Chairman Sir Hugh Robertson commented: “Thanks to this crisis relief package, hundreds of millions of pounds in vital funding has been repurposed to help those most affected by the coronavirus pandemic – providing, among other things, much-needed aid for communities, grants for sport initiatives to keep people fit and healthy, and assistance for thousands of other projects that are in desperate need of funding during this time. Anyone who has bought a National Lottery ticket should know they’ve played their part in making this possible.”

The performance means The National Lottery continues to generate over £30m a week for Good Causes across the UK. With the amount also delivered to government through Lottery Duty, this rises to more than £50m a week for society. And it takes the total raised for Good Causes since 1994 to over £41bn.

National Lottery funding has now been awarded to more than 565,000 individual projects – more than 200 lottery grants, on average, in every UK postcode district.

ONGOING RETAIL INVESTMENT

Accounting for nearly 70% of all ticket sales, retail remains the largest National Lottery sales channel. Despite ongoing challenges in the retail environment, Camelot grew in-store sales by £74.3m (+1.4%) to £5,447.6m over the 12 months.

As a result, National Lottery retailers, many of them small independent businesses, earned £312.7m in commission, a +2.8% increase and an average of around £7,000 per store.

In a further step to help its retail partners during the current situation, Camelot is removing all Scratchcard returns charges for games closed in the March/April 2020 Scratchcard game closure. The company will remove all 32 games from each retailer’s inventory and local Retail Sales Executives will visit stores to collect any full unactivated packs when it is safe to do so.

A HUGE THANK YOU TO RETAILERS!

Camelot CEO Nigel Railton offers his thanks to all National Lottery retailers for their contribution in making this a record year and also for their ongoing support more recently during this challenging period. View the message at www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xw6xSRaCWbc&feature=emb_logo