The years of the lottery

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Ten years of the

Lottery

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Transforming the nation Thank you for helping to raise over £16 billion for Good Causes By playing National Lottery games over the past 10 years, you’ve helped raise over £16 billion for more than 180,000 Good Causes, helping to transform communities the length and breadth of the UK. Your money has helped fund landmark projects like Tate Modern and the Eden Project, through to the thousands of smaller awards that make a big difference – from improving the facilities in hundreds of village halls and community centres, to supporting sport from grass roots level up.

That’s quite an achievement, so thank you for the part that you’ve played.

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national lottery ● 8 November 2004 ● newstatesman

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Everyone’s a winner

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am the National Lottery’s PR dream. When the big blue hand jumps out of the television and tells me “It could be you”, I believe it. I even enlist the help of my three-year-old son to pick the numbers, on the pretext of it being an educational game. And while we have not stooped to simulating the event with a tumble-dryer and ping-pong balls, we have made good use of car number-plates and bits of paper in a bag. But the fact that you are reading this is evidence enough that our tactics are failing. Still, winning the jackpot, appealing though that is, is not really the point of the Lottery anyway. And one thing that is failing as much as my ability to win is the ability of those responsible to get that message across. That the person on the street has no idea where the £1 goes or what “good causes”are being funded by the Lottery is a PR disaster.

Critics argue that the Lottery is in decline, and its glory years are behind it. Whether that is true or not – and Camelot, which runs the Lottery, disputes it – many extra games have been introduced. The trouble, for anyone other than the habitual player, is that it is now hard to find the right bit of paper to mark your numbers on.

To address the public’s lack of awareness, the Culture Secretary, Tessa Jowell, last year launched the National Lottery Blue Plaque scheme. On the premise that it is important for the public to be able to link the game with the projects funded by it, every Lottery beneficiary was to be awarded a plaque. Just like the English Heritage plaques of the same name, people would be able to see them as they walked past. But when we conducted our own small survey of passers-by, no one had heard of the

scheme, let alone seen a plaque, and very few could name one beneficiary.

Evidently, something has to change. One possible answer is involving the public more in the decisionmaking process to ensure the funding goes where the public wants it to. This is particularly pertinent when there are growing concerns over the government’s control of Lottery money. Ahead of official legislation, the New Opportunities Fund and the Community Fund have become the Big Lottery Fund. It is too early to see what effect this will have on funding, but the charity and voluntary sectors are very worried that their open approach to funding will disappear and that “PR sensitive” projects, such as those involving asylum-seekers or prisoners, will lose out.

The media attack on these projects is extremely detrimental to the Lottery. In the huge amount of applications for funding, it is easy to find a murderer-turned-poet who has won funding at the expense of an impoverished war veteran. But the media hostility detracts from the enormous amount of projects that have been funded from the Lottery’s purse – projects that create amazing resources, and whose benefits also reach the areas of health and education for which the government would love to be using the money.

You have to be in the game to win the game. But remember, as you are hiding your ticket in your underwear or waiting for a bird to poo on your head (this is apparently lucky), that the game is also a question of public rights, and anything that threatens them should be cause for alarm.

Natalie Brierley, supplement editor

contents

vi Ian Walker on too many games vii Gerald Kaufman on pillaging Chancellors viii Jane Taylor talks to Estelle Morris x Jonathan Glancey on the arts xii Chris Wheal on learning from mistakes xiv Mark Slattery on regulation xv Nick Greenslade on sport xxii Stephen Bubb on the threat to charities xxiv Vanessa Potter defends the Big Lottery Fund xxvi Mark Slattery wants an end to privacy xxvii Martin Wainwright on giving the public a voice xxviii Ellie Levenson on who deserves to win xxix Tim Smit on the Eden Project xxx Richard Wiseman on luck Editor: Natalie Brierley Sub-editors: Damien Black; Vicky Hutchings Design: Leon Parks Cover: Dan Murrell Researchers: Christy Kulz and Rukshana Baki newstatesman subscriber services: Stephen Brasher Freephone: 0800 731 8496 E-mail: sbrasher@newstatesman.co.uk Published by New Statesman Limited. A supplement to the newstatesman issue 8 November 2004. © All rights reserved. Registered as a newspaper in the UK and USA. Address: 52 Grosvenor Gardens, London SW1W 0AU

This supplement can be downloaded from the NS website at www.newstatesman.com/supplements

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Interview talks to , chief executive of Camelot DIANNE THOMPSON

he party was in full swing and the champagne flowing.

A diminutive female figure appeared at the elbow of the chief executive of a major blue-chip company with a great big smile on her face. Within minutes, a hefty donation was offered and the ChildLine charity was several thousand pounds better off. By the end of the night, there were promises of £17,000 in the bag.

It’s a pattern that started several weeks ago when Camelot boss Dianne Thompson took on the challenge of raising £1m for ChildLine to fund the technology that will enable thousands more abused and frightened children to get help.

Raising money for the Good Causes is not just part of Thompson’s working life as head of one of the biggest lotteries, and arguably the most successful, in the world. It’s representative of the culture she has introduced at Camelot, which – along with the National Lottery itself – celebrates its 10th anniversary this month.

“We give our staff six days paid leave a year to do community work, especially for giving something back to the local community. I’m using my six days to raise money for the ChildLine Foundation. Every day, 4,000 children call the organisation, but there is only the capacity to deal with 2,300 calls,” says Thompson. She rather understates her “community work”. In fact, Thompson has put together a seriously well-connected fundraising committee and is aiming to raise the seven-figure sum in just 12 months.

ChildLine is in safe hands. Because being chief executive of Camelot makes Thompson Britain’s leading “fundraiser” – by some margin. Since the National Lottery launched in 1994, players have raised a staggering £16bn for the designated Good Causes – the equivalent of the GDP of Luxembourg.

In October, the company announced that ticket sales had increased by £100m on last year, to £2.35bn. Between April and October, Camelot generated more than £630m for the Good Causes – that’s more than £23m a week and 8.5 per cent up year on year.

It was a huge turnaround in the Lottery’s fortunes and a very different picture to that of two years ago, when adverse publicity over controversial grants to organisations that helped asylum-seekers and one connected with the IRA contributed to a slump in sales. Or four years ago, when it seemed the new Lottery licence was sure to go elsewhere amid accusations of “fat cattery” among executives.

Camelot, if not dead in the water, was certainly struggling for breath. Thompson first led a spectacular “comeback” against stiff competition, a hostile regulator and the inevitable media feeding frenzy. But that was just part of the battle. She admits that the company was in poor shape

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when she managed to wrest the new licence from under Sir Richard Branson’s nose in 2000. And she could have opted for a “quick fix” to get the company back on track, but instead initiated a full-scale cultural revolution, taking apart much of the company structure – right down to the partitions at its Watford headquarters.

“We went through five months of hell. The very public fight for the second licence had taken a huge internal toll. While I had been fighting for the bid, 300 people had left – and I didn’t blame them. When you are in bid mode, you don’t take any risks. For a couple of years, we just focused on the basics, and by default we knocked the innovation and creativity out of the company. Morale was very low.”

From her experience at Woolworths and Ratner, Thompson knew that, after a crisis, people are ready for change. But it was, she says, “like turning around a supertanker”.

With her newly recruited team, she set about creating a fresh vision and focus for her staff. A down-to-earth Yorkshirewoman, she gives a wry smile at the mention of New Age team-building exercises and says simply: “We needed to do it and it worked.”

A programme was developed called “Winning Ways”, with staff going to day-long sessions in groups of 25 to learn about teamwork and sharing goals. Workers were encouraged to find out about each other’s jobs and help each other out.

Flexible working hours were introduced along with job-sharing, which worked especially well for women juggling the demands of a family with their work – a subject inevitably close to the heart of this particular single mother.

And finally the Watford headquarters were refurbished, with partitions ripped down to make way for an open-plan office decorated in softer colours chosen by the staff.

Says Thompson: “We now have the strongest team Camelot has ever had, partly because of the people we have chosen and partly because of the culture we have nurtured. The previous vision was to be the best Lottery operator in the world. We are excellent operators, but that is a very process-driven vision. We lost sight of the consumer – and the fact that the Lottery is supposed to be fun.”

“Serving the Nation’s Dreams” became the new company slogan, with a focus on two things – raising money for Good Causes and serving individual dreams, which presumably includes more than 1,700 millionaires that the Lottery has created since its launch.

With the second licence won and a new team and new culture in place, it was time for Thompson to turn her attention to the core purpose of the business: selling tickets.

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Smooth operator: Dianne Thompson pictured at the launch of the National Lottery on mobile phones

Although Britain has always been in the top five lotteries in the world by total sales, Camelot was unable to buck the widely acknowledged international trend of falling sales.

Thompson challenged this “inevitability”.

“We turned it around the hard way. There were some quick fixes that we could have embraced. Some lotteries hold a main draw six or seven nights a week, encouraging those people who have used the same numbers since the launch to play every single day. We felt it would be socially irresponsible to force up total sales by encouraging some people to spend a lot of money each week.

“After all, the Lottery is supposed to be a force for good in society, and in this context a very high per capita spend does not sound very ‘good’ to me.”

Camelot’s stated objective is to encourage a very large number of people – currently 70 per cent of the adult population – to spend just a small amount, currently about £2.60 a week. “We also considered increasing the price, on the basis that £1 today is worth just 60p of what it was worth when we started. But you can imagine what people would have made of that!” says Thompson, with a smile.

Instead, a new raft of smaller games was introduced, along with innovative new ways to play. You can now buy a Lottery ticket through your mobile phone, on the internet or via interactive television. Plans are also well advanced for players to buy tickets at supermarket checkouts in a pilot programme with Tesco.

“People of my daughter’s generation don’t shop like we do.

They nip into the supermarket on the way home and get

something for that night’s supper. They don’t do the big weekly shop, so the point of sale at the supermarket isn’t going to appeal to them as much as texting,” says Thompson.

The company is careful not to attract under-16s and has set up checks to prevent this from happening. “When we launched the play by text game, one of the directors of National Children’s Homes tried to use his 16-year-old daughter’s phone to play, but couldn’t get into the system,” says Thompson.

But the Lottery is not just about sales, marketing and technology. In its short ten years, the National Lottery has become part of the national way of life – perhaps the country’s youngest national institution. And that comes with its own challenges – and frustrations.

Top of Thompson’s list is that players often have little or no idea about which Good Causes have benefited from that 28p in every Lottery pound. She says: “There are some fantastic, iconic projects like the Eden Project, which has created hundreds of jobs, extended Cornwall’s tourist season by two months and now brings in an extra £150m of tourist revenue to a relatively poor county.

“The north-east has been transformed with the help of Lottery money. And around the country, 300 Healthy Living Centres are used by 12 million people. On top of that, more than 500 village halls have been refurbished or built, bringing focus back into local communities. And hundreds of Olympic athletes would never have been able to take part – let alone bring back the biggest medal haul since the 1920s – without Lottery funding.

“All these things far outweigh the controversial grants, not least those projects helping asylum-seekers. Lessons have been learned by all concerned, the most important of which is that the public are much less likely to stop playing the Lottery in protest against a particular project they dislike if they know something about the tens of thousands of projects that have done so much good.”

Things are set to change now that Camelot – working with 14 Lottery distributors – has the go-ahead to put up blue plaques bearing the iconic crossed fingers logo on thousands of projects around the country. The company is paying for the first 10,000, and most new Lottery-funded projects will put one up as a condition of grant.

And, of course, the 10th birthday celebrations present their own opportunity to focus on the breadth of Lottery-funded projects, as well as “an opportunity to say thank you to our players”. Public parties are scheduled for Cardiff, Belfast, Glasgow and at London’s Tate Modern. And hundreds of Lottery-funded projects are throwing open their doors for free to celebrate what will also be the first ever National Lottery Day. “It’s a great moment to stand back and reflect on what has been achieved, particularly by those millions of Lottery players who have made it all possible. I’m very proud of the Lottery – and of them.”

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newstatesman ● 8 November 2004 ● national lottery

Too much of a gamble?

From the proliferation of games, you might think the Lottery was flourishing. But it hasn’t always been that way. IAN WALKER suggests a simple ball transplant may help

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he chance of winning was just one in 14 million. Yet despite the odds, the National Lottery’s debut draw was a huge success. And this success continued over the following years, helped by an unusually high number of roll-overs and excited journalists, who searched out the winners to trumpet their joy to the rest of the dreaming nation.

No one even seemed to care when Camelot gave itself handsome bonuses. We loved the Lottery.

But the Lottery alone was not enough. Three months later came Scratchcards, which quickly attracted 40 million players a week. But by 1999, sales had fallen to ten million a week, and only recently have they enjoyed a revival. Shortly after the Lottery’s second birthday, the Wednesday draw was introduced. For a while, this boosted overall sales to more than £100m a week. But the magic soon began to wear off.

Wednesday sales held up for a year or two, but when a roll-over famine hit, these, too, began to decline.

The Lottery was in trouble. The solution?

Yet another game, the Saturday Thunderball, which offered better odds of intermediate prizes and a fixed top prize of £250,000. Support was wobbly at first, but soon stabilised at around five million people. A year and a half later, the Saturday and Wednesday “Extras” were invented. To play these, you had to buy a regular Lottery ticket as well.

Not many people were willing to stake £2 on their dream, especially as there were no consolation prizes – if you failed to match all six balls, you went empty-handed. The Extra games rolled over again and again, and few people were interested in playing a game that no one ever seemed to win. The Extra flop was closely followed by the launch of the Wednesday Thunderball. Even though this regularly made sales of £2.5m, the Lottery continued to decline.

The diversification of games was a complicated, often confusing, response to falling sales. But the solution was simple.

The problem was that the designs of the Wednesday and Saturday games were not right for their respective market size.

Wednesday was too hard to win and the roll-overs were so small that Saturday players hardly noticed. The Saturday game was too easy, which meant that Wednesday suffered from roll-over droughts. The two games needed separating. A ball transplant would also have helped. Wednesday needed to lose a ball or two to make it easier to win; Saturday needed to gain a

ball or two to make it harder to win and to generate some big roll-overs to lure the punters back.

But Camelot was worried that after such radical surgery the public would love the Lottery less. Instead, the operator reached for the medicine it knew best – diversification – and yet more games were introduced: Daily Play, HotPicks, EuroMillions, and the very latest online and mobile phone games. Around 1.5 million EuroMillions tickets are sold in the UK, but sales in Spain and France are collectively nine times higher. Daily Play sales, which began close to £2.5m a week, have fallen steadily to around £1m; HotPicks sales have also seriously dropped in its three-year history. It is too early to tell what long-term impact the online and phone games will have.

Camelot has run all these games efficiently, with only occasional and usually minor glitches. But if Camelot is unopposed when the licence to run the Lottery is again up for renewal, it will be a reflection of how the operator has done a good job in return for not very much. After ten years, it is clear that a national lottery does not necessarily offer easy pickings, and that you have to work hard, even take risks, to stay ahead. Camelot has suffered from playing safe, content to allow the market size to match the game design instead of changing the game design to expand the market.

Across the whole portfolio of games, sales are around £90m per week, not far off the peak of £100m seven years ago – and nearly double the £48m a week when the Lottery first began. But if you take inflation into account, what seems a modest decline of 10 per cent is in fact a real decline of around 30 per cent. So why not raise the ticket prices? The trouble is that sales depend partly on the ease of purchase: thus a price of £1, which minimises fumbling for change, has a strong appeal.

The somewhat awkward price of a EuroMillions ticket in the UK (£1.50) might help explain its lack of appeal here compared to France or Spain (where tickets cost two euros).

The Department for Culture and the good causes can only suffer “money illusion” for so long. The real slide in sales will eventually sink in. Camelot needs to start thinking more inventively about how to rekindle our love for the Lottery.

Ian Walker is professor of economics at the University of Warwick

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national lottery ● 8 November 2004 ● newstatesman

Weapon of mass distribution Lottery funds are being raided for the benefit of the Treasury’s coffers, writes GERALD KAUFMAN

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do not trust Chancellors of the Exchequer. No, this is not an attack on Gordon Brown. I believe, in fact, that Brown is the best Chancellor in my political lifetime, and that he has done wonders in implementing Labour’s social and economic agendas. However, like every Chancellor I have known since I was elected to the House of Commons 34 years ago, if he can get away with not spending money from the Treasury kitty, he will do just that.

As I say, he is not alone in this. When Labour came to power in March 1974, I raised with the then prime minister, Harold Wilson, the possibility of television licences (very unpopular even then) being replaced with a grant to the BBC from a specially established public agency, rather like the University Grants Commission, which funded the universities. Wilson was attracted to the idea, but the Chancellor of the day, Denis Healey, vetoed it. He did not want to spend Treasury money when there was a hypothecated tax for which he was not required to take the blame.

When John Major’s government established the National Lottery, the Secretary of State for National Heritage, Peter Brooke, vowed that a strict additionality principle would apply to the allocation of Lottery grants, which stated that they could not be used as a substitute for mainstream government funding on arts and heritage projects. I believed that Brooke was sincere, but I did not believe that his sincerity stood a chance against a pillaging Chancellor.

I was justified in my scepticism at the time, and have been ever since. Projects and causes that would previously have been paid for by the Treasury, if publicly funded at all, are often almost automatically the recipients of Lottery cash; and many deserving Lottery applications are turned down because

the funding agencies do not have sufficient money left. What is more, some of those funding agencies are beginning to squeal about the depredations of their funds by the Exchequer.

At the beginning of this year, the culture, media and sport select committee, with myself in the chair, conducted an inquiry into the state of the National Lottery. Questions were asked about the robustness of the additionality principle. While government ministers, as expected, protested that it was alive and well, other witnesses had a different, less rosy view.

Additionality was meant to stop grants being a substitute for public spending The Lotteries Council warned: “Additionality is something we take a strong line on, and we think that line is getting blurred.” It referred to “a great deal of concern about the erosion of the additionality principle”. The National Council for Voluntary Organisations believed that “Lottery funding should be independent from government but accountable to parliament . . . it should be additional to what should be properly spent by government and not a substitute for it”. The council was concerned that this was not happening.

Even more worrying, one of the Lottery’s own funding bodies, the New Opportunities Fund, responsible for allocating grants to worthy local projects, saw fit to redefine the additionality principle, to an extent that made it almost meaningless: “A more helpful way to look at it is really the concept of added value: what value is it that comes

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from Lottery money rather than from government spending.”

Helpful to whom? Applicants – or the Treasury? This vague concept of “added value” could justify the Lottery being used to fund such mainstream government policies as health, education and law and order. The Treasury minister John Healey has asserted that “Lottery money . . . should allow things to happen that would not happen if it depended simply on government funding alone”. If anything gave the game away, it was that sophisticated (dare I say sophistic?) definition.

But Tessa Jowell, the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport, gave the game (literally) away when she said of the plan to part-fund the Olympic Games from the Lottery (if the London bid were successful): “Lottery is paying or underwriting a large share of the public cost of the Olympics, because this is something that, were that funding not available, it is very unlikely that the government would have supported.”

She is absolutely right. One can just imagine Brown grumbling: “I’m not going to tax people to pay for this ridiculous rubbish.”

A special Lottery game to fund the Olympics is being provided for by special act of parliament, because otherwise such a game would be illegal. Yet to listen to the government, from the Prime Minister downwards (though the Chancellor maintains a dignified reticence on the subject), the Olympics is a core project to which it would be shaming for Britain not to aspire. This Olympic raid on the Lottery means that countless, often worthy, Lottery applications will have to be turned down because the money will not be there.

The government should come clean. It should admit, as its Tory predecessors should have done, that the additionality principle is bogus and that it will use the Lottery, ruthlessly, to fund projects that are core government policy. It should admit that the Lottery is a weapon of mass distribution.

Gerald Kaufman is Labour MP for Manchester Gorton

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newstatesman ● 8 November 2004 ● national lottery

ns interview estelle morris

The Lottery minister is consummate at the “just trust me” line. She insists the government is not trying to pull a fast one

by JANE TAYLOR

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et you didn’t know Estelle Morris was the Lottery minister. Indeed, after ten years, it’s not obvious why we need a Lottery minister; after all, the National Lottery is a wholly subcontracted private sector monopoly operation with a legal framework and its own regulator to keep things clean, decent and not too profitable.

But that’s just half of the Lottery – the input side, if you like.

The minister’s job is more about watching over the output side: the £1.5bn from our ticket purchases every year that goes on “good causes”. And as John Major reminded us in his timely side swipe a couple of weeks ago, that kind of river of gold is sufficiently tempting that only the oddest of governments would fail to appoint a minister to look after it.

Which is not quite how Major put it. The government was guilty of “grand larceny”, he said, accusing it of dipping into Lottery funds to bolster its mainstream public spending commitments, something Major never intended back in 1994.

Morris (who didn’t get her reputation for being nice by not being nice) says the former prime minister is living in the past.

“John Major deserves congratulations for setting the Lottery up. It was a brave political act . . . [but] we had a mandate from the people.” She is referring to the changes new Labour made in 1997, adding education, environment and health to the

“What I’d find unforgivable was a government that did what we did and then cut Exchequer funding” existing Lottery beneficiaries of arts, sports, charities, heritage and the millennium. “What I’d find absolutely unforgivable was a government that did what we did in 1997 – and then cut Exchequer funding . . . because on that basis, it would be a straight swap. We didn’t do that. It happened alongside huge increases in funding, so I’m at ease in that in my own political mind.”

Would that it were so simple. In fact, the rules preventing substitution of Lottery for tax spend (known as “additionality”) are rather more nuanced – no, murky. So murky that, earlier this year, Gerald Kaufman and the culture select committee he chairs spent an entire session agonising about the

concept, booked themselves a follow-up inquiry and ordered the Culture Secretary to provide an annual report on how she was applying the additionality rule. Kaufman is, it must be said, weirdly obsessed with the Lottery, and a far more brutal critic than Major on the matter of the government pinching the people’s money. But his committee’s concern is not without foundation.

How does Morris define the test for additionality, I ask? Her reply starts promisingly: “I’m going to be a bit contradictory about my own government now.” She doesn’t agree with the official line on this question, “which says”, she explains, “the issue isn’t whether a government does, um, would fund, um, it isn’t an issue of whether the government will fund it, no, does fund it, it’s whether it would fund it.”

Never mind additionality, I am lost in conditionality at this point. But thankfully it doesn’t matter, because Morris doesn’t buy that line. “My own line on this is whether it is almost a statutory function of government, a proper expenditure by government, in the way that it has always spent money. And if it funded any of its statutory obligations through the Lottery, I’d have concern. So those are the sorts of things I tend to look at when other ministers whisper in your ear and ask if the Lottery might fund some of their pet projects.”

Who controls the cash river has been at the top of the Lottery’s political agenda throughout this year. The Culture Secretary, Tessa Jowell, announced last year that, should London win the 2012 Olympics, she would divert £750m of good cause money to help fund the games. The government is also busy rationalising the quangos that give out the funds. A great idea in principle (it is daft to have 15 separate funders), the process is making the charity sector in particular very nervous. The Lottery has been a fairy godmother to voluntary organisations over the past ten years, but now the charities quango is being taken over by the new Labour-created quango to form the Orwellian-sounding Big Lottery Fund.

The new body, charities say, will only fund projects that fit in with themed priorities – set by government. The sector stands to lose its open-ended funding stream, which allowed a diversity of applications to be assessed on merit. Morris knows the arguments well: it is she who has been in constant dialogue over the small print of the forthcoming legislation: “I’ve met the leaders of the charitable arms several times since

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the summer, and my feeling is that they do accept our verbal assurances . . . Their fears are whether it will really turn out like that.” So she adds, reassuringly: “I understand their concerns.

I know our intentions, but we’re just going to have to believe each other and keep holding hands until we can actually show how it turns out.”

You can see why Tony Blair gave Morris her comeback chance as arts minister: she is consummate at the “just trust me” line that he no longer dares use himself. No wonder the teachers’ unions shed tears when she resigned as Education Secretary in October 2002. She is superbly comforting. I ask whether it’s true that the draft legislation locks the new quango into a vice-like grip, so that the government (despite Jowell’s promises to the contrary) can even more closely determine how it spends Lottery money. “I see our challenge at the moment being to write the legislation in a way that reflects the promises we have given. We’re not trying to pull a fast one, we’re not trying to do a trick.”

OK, let’s try another hard case. Ever since a media furore last year over Lottery-funded Peruvian guinea-pig farmers, it has been rumoured that the Big Lottery Fund wants to rule out future funding for international charitable work. Does the minister think this is a proper use of Lottery funding? “Yes I do . . . It should be there in the Big Lottery

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Fund as one of the outcomes,” she says. That counts as a biff on the nose for the Big Lottery Fund, I think.

Another follows, as I question Morris about the way the sports, arts and heritage quangos are backsliding on their commitments to the Lottery’s hugely successful small-grants scheme Awards for All. As the minister points out, this fund is heavily tapped by community groups for local sports projects. As I point out, Sport England has halved its contribution this year – “And I’m critical of that,” she jumps in. “I don’t know whether I should be publicly or not, but they ought not to do that. There’s a generosity of spirit that’s needed, and they could still achieve their aims by putting money into Awards for All.” Take that, Sport England.

There’s one big Lottery mess that the Department for Culture, Media and Sport seems to have parked in a corner, ever since another parliamentary scrutiny committee chucked it back at the start of the year. This is the matter of how to organise the competition for the third seven-year lottery licence, which runs from 2009. One thing alone matters here: to find someone, anyone (though preferably not Richard Branson), prepared to bid against Camelot. The regulator recommended divvying up the franchise so that several smaller companies could run one or more of the games, a solution that attracted universal derision. So we’re all waiting for a better idea. “We’ve been having a good hard look,” Morris says. “I can’t tell you what we’ve decided because it’s not been cleared by government.”

What will the government do if the nightmare scenario happens in a couple of years’ time and only Camelot bids? “The answer might accommodate that. You’ll have to wait and see.”

What are the chances that the government would then nationalise the Lottery? “What, run it ourselves? Not high.”

How does the minister think the public rate the Lottery on its tenth birthday? “I think it’s become part of the landscape, a force of habit.” But she also acknowledges an “uneasy truce”, as the public’s anger is periodically mobilised against high-profile, unpopular beneficiaries of Lottery funds. She is still on this theme as I ask her about lessons learnt: “I suspect the level of public awareness about where the money goes is far, far too low, and that’s our fault. That’s a lesson learnt.”

How typically Estelle Morris: anxious to shoulder the blame, she’s confessing to a crime in which the government’s culpability is very minor compared to the failures of all the other partners in the Lottery funding industry.

I leave with a genuine sense of regret that this thoughtful, open, decent politician will soon be history (she is leaving parliament at the next election), because her style embodies what many of us believed was going to be different about new Labour back in the early, optimistic days. As Morris slips quietly out of view, however, I have no doubt that the Lottery roller-coaster will continue to vex and excite politicians and people for the next ten years.

Jane Taylor is the former editor of the independent newsletter Lottery Monitor

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x newstatesman ● 8 November 2004 ● national lottery

Vibrant, accessible, caffè latte culture There’s no doubt that millennium funding has transformed the face of many British city centres. But not always for the better, writes JONATHAN GLANCEY

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ame me one thing that millennium funding has done for us? There probably is a new aqueduct somewhere among the legions of new buildings and structures marching promiscuously the length and breadth of Britain since the various arms of the Millennium Commission began distributing vast sums of money for heroic new capital projects a decade ago.

The face of many British cities has been transformed as a result. You would have to look long and hard to find one today without a millennium centre of one kind or another. Where once there was the ubiquitous Victoria memorial or grand municipal public convenience, all brass, marble and Edwardian flamboyance, today you will almost inevitably come across a mighty millennium-funded museum. At the very least. There may be a millennium conference centre, a millennium park or one of those ambitious multipurpose millennium centres that – big, puffy and “iconic” – no one knows quite what to do with soon after the gala opening.

In my own city, London, millennium funding has created or transformed some of the capital’s most popular tourist attractions. Has Lottery money been well spent on these? The numbers can be looked up on the web, or even in a Lotteryfunded library (or Idea Store, as we are learning to call stuffy old libraries lined with boring books today). Vibrant, accessible – as they must be to have got funding in the first place – and swimming in cappuccinos, these are the great populist cultural gestures of our times. Their success rests not so much on their design or even their content, but on the number of people who pass through them. And who would dare to stand up today and criticise such a democratic investment in popular culture?

True, Tate Modern, the former Bankside Power Station transformed into a powerhouse of modern art, resembles a cross between Gatwick Airport on a summer bank holiday and the Bluewater shopping mall in the weeks leading up to Christmas. It is a real crush. But the figures are there to show that it is an enormous, critic-defying success. The Millennium – or No Longer Wobbly – Bridge, by Foster, Arup and Anthony Caro, is another considerable success. A fascinating structure – a suspension bridge laid flat – it is rarely less than crowded, bearing several million visitors a year from St Paul’s Cathedral to Tate Modern.

What such projects appear to have done is opened London up to the experience of the grand European city stroll whereby citizenry, and increasingly tourists, throng principal streets in the early evening, or on Sundays, to see, be seen, eat an ice cream and even make a cursory or polite visit to some plumply funded cultural event.

All this is fine. It is quite remarkable, and rather special, to see so many people eagerly thronging the south bank of the Thames as it winds along the fringe of Southwark, a borough that, always fascinating for Londoners, was until very recently well below the salt. Perhaps, then, it is not so much the millennium buildings we should be so proud of – many are little more than vacuous bunkum – but the ways in which

Will new Labour’s new casinos be Lottery-funded too?

It would make sense prodigious funding has helped to revitalise our city centres, many of them tired and a little purposeless after the industrial decline and fallout of the 1970s and 1980s.

There remains, though, something rather sad about the way so many of our cities, clearly in need of more than a wash and brush up, have invested so heavily in the external trappings of this Lottery-funded culture. So much of this new, vibrant, accessible, 24-hour, millennium culture seems to be either imposed on British cities, squawking for investment like chicks in a nest, or else imported wholesale from London and other European capitals as if every city today must have exactly the same cultural venues, tourist destinations, events and concerns.

Although it has been good in recent years to see the great northern cities pulling themselves up by the Velcro of their smart trainers (officially, bootstraps went out with whippets, pies, pigeon-fancying and Hilda Ogden’s hairnet), and to find the banks of the Tyne lined with one inclusive, accessible, vibrant, etc, arts venue after the other, it has been not so good to see these same cities lose, throw away or be stripped of the cultures that once made them both distinctive and important.

TATE

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Weird and wonderful

Unusual projects funded by the Lottery

● A Lottery grant helped Highlanders prepare for an

Heritage hits:Tate Modern and the American Air Museum, Duxford

HERITAGE LOTTERY FUND

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As I write, the old Vulcan Works in Merseyside is being demolished. This was where Stephenson built locomotives for the Liverpool and Manchester Railway, where locomotives were exported worldwide into the age of diesel and electric traction. The site was most recently owned by French and German companies, because the British today loathe and despise manufacturing, especially when there is easy money to be had from the Lottery, from flogging off the public sector, and from the supremely crass and wilfully patronising new Labour casinos coming to a city centre near you very soon. Will these be Lottery-funded, too? It would make sense. The site of the old Vulcan Works is being cleared for junk housing and downmarket chain stores.

In the past, British towns and cities were known by their various expertise, whether this was cotton from Manchester, lace from Nottingham, locomotives from Swindon, Glasgow, Doncaster, Horwich and Crewe. Today, they all share the same post-industrial, retail-era, caffè-latte culture, propped up by Lottery-fuelled architecture, design and events.

Stripped of their historic and distinctive roles, all too many British towns and cities have gone begging to the Lottery, or else been fed by it, as if to keep their citizens sweet.

This is the dark side of Lottery funding. There is, though, another side, which has proved a national delight in very many ways – notably, the work of the Heritage Lottery Fund.

Imaginative and generous, this often august body has reached out to fund old and batty museums, the restoration of historic aircraft, ships and locomotives, the construction of the glorious Welsh Highland Railway, the building of the quietly dignified American Air Museum at Duxford and numerous other projects that have the power to delight most of us in one way or another.

So many of these have been low-key or gentle schemes, ones in which local people are genuinely involved, and which stem from local and passionately held enthusiasms. They are the stuff of a culture emanating from, and truly loved by, people of all classes, creeds, ages, incomes and parts of the country.

This really is an achievement to be proud of, a lottery that has worked for the common good. Don’t expect the new casinos to do anything like the same.

attack from Europe by killer bloodsucking mites. The intended victim – Scotland’s native honey bees. The money funded an apiary, used for training beekeepers and educating them how to protect the bees.

It also paid for new hives and beekeeping equipment. The Scottish honey bee is a pure rare breed. The grant made an enormous difference in protecting the future of Scotland as the world’s only producer of heather honey. ● An innovative new car jack is being developed with the

help of Lottery funding. “Airjack 2000” was conceived by lorry driver Leeroy Brown from Birmingham. He hopes that it will end the misery for motorists who have to grapple with a traditional jack when they get a flat tyre.

Brown’s jack is powered from the car’s cigarette lighter which enables a compressor to inflate an airbag, raising the car safely and quickly. The invention will hopefully hit the shelves by the end of this year. ● Dr Linda Long has discovered that the proteins in the

human body, of which there are tens of thousands, can make “molecular music”. With the help of Lottery funding, “Listen to your Body”, an interactive exhibition designed by Long at Explore-at-Bristol, takes the protein shapes and translates them into music, giving each protein its own song. Now students, from GCSE to degree level, can discover exactly what the human body is made from by using the note sequences of the protein “songs”. CDs available. ● In 2002, with the help of Lottery funding, Liam Curtin

harnessed Blackpool’s high-tide sea-swell to an organ to make music. The sculpture, which stands on Blackpool’s south promenade, is 50ft high and is a permanent fixture.

It works by the tide pushing air through the pipes and is the first interpretive public artwork that uses the natural forces of the high-tide swell. ● The Charlotte Cinema Club, the smallest cinema in

Wales, is housed in a converted railway carriage in a back garden in Gorseinon, Swansea. It screened its first film in October 1953, and film buffs have filled the 23 seats ever since. More than 50 years of operation were starting to show and finances were tight. A Lottery grant helped purchase a new video projection and sound system, and there is now a 70-long waiting list to join the club, whose decor has remained exactly the same since the club of neighbours and friends began.

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Do you know or care where the money goes?

Rob Aldridge Construction worker in London I buy five tickets on Wednesday and five on Saturday.

I don’t really know how the money gets divided, but I think something like 30 per cent of the profits go to good causes. I know loads of projects that have had Lottery funding. I just can’t think of them right now. The Eden Project, Tate Modern, I think. And that’s all. Oh, and the British Museum. I do care where the money goes, to a certain extent. I’d like to say it made a difference to my buying tickets, but it doesn’t. I’m just playing out of desperation.

Maureen Patrick Carer in Orpington I never buy Lottery tickets, though I might if I was convinced by the good causes that the money goes to.

Right now, I couldn’t tell you where the money goes.

They keep quite a bit for their own expenses and I suppose the rest goes to various charities. But I couldn’t name any. The money could be used in a better way – for example, more grants for small projects so they don’t fold. But it’s difficult to apply for funding.

John Downey Retired in Ireland I’ve bought one or two Lottery tickets in the past. I think the money goes to arts or something like that. I don’t know – museums, galleries, perhaps. I haven’t a clue which, though. I couldn’t name any specific projects that have been funded. I think some should go to health and education, but I’d prefer more help to go to charities for the disabled, poor and immigrants. However, where the money goes doesn’t really have any bearing on whether or not I buy a ticket.

Jeremy Pryce Teacher in Wolverhampton I don’t often buy tickets. I know some of the money goes to charities. I think the Lottery funded the Olympic team, and the Royal Opera House, but I can’t think of any others. I do care where the money goes, but it doesn’t influence whether I buy a Lottery ticket.

Simon Malloy Welder in Penzance I never buy Lottery tickets. The odds are so hopeless and I’m a really unlucky person, so there’s no point.

Although, saying that, I would buy tickets if the Lottery was not for profit. I haven’t got a clue where the money goes at the moment. That’s not to say I don’t care, though.

If it’s public money, it should definitely be spent on social schemes that benefit the community.

Hard lessons to learn Most Lottery projects are a great success, but we hear a lot more about the few that fail. At least those involved are striving not to repeat their mistakes.

By CHRIS WHEAL

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o err is human, but to really foul things up requires Lottery money. Wherever you live, you may not know about any of the excellent Lottery-funded facilities down your street. However, the odds are that you’ll know about the local Lottery failure.

In Scotland, perhaps you’re bothered about the Big Idea science centre in Irvine (£5.3m Millennium Commission funding), a bad idea that failed to inspire the scientifically calculated visitor numbers and was deemed too stupid to find ongoing support. In Bradford, the leap of blind faith that was the Life Force intercultural faith centre (£2m Millennium Commission funding) produced so few disciples that the building is now used by an arts group.

In Sheffield, the National Centre for Popular Music (£11m Arts Council funding) opened with less of a fanfare and more of a scratchy B-side. It closed after four months. The building is now the local university’s student union, serving up Special Brew instead. In north London, the closed and close-tocollapse Clissold Leisure Centre in Hackney (£10m Sports Council funding) remains the subject of legal battles over who is to blame. But who thought of giving money to a council with no overall political control, most of its senior management missing and a reputation from the Audit Commission for poor and weak management?

In Wales, the leek and daffodil lovers must despair at the National Botanic Garden (£22m Millennium Commission funding), which in October needed an urgent liberal spreading of cash manure to keep the garden in bloom. In Bath, the Spa (nearly £8m Millennium Commission funding) is now more famous for contractors sparring with each other in legal punch-ups that have prevented the Roman restroom from opening. And Daily Mail readers nationwide will remain outraged that the Community Fund recklessly threw £336,261 at the asylum-supporting lefties of the National Coalition of Anti-Deportation Campaigns.

It’s an impressive list of cock-ups, but you could fit all of them in the biggest misuse of public money in peacetime – the Millennium Dome. This £628m (£229m more than originally forecast) overgrown Boy Scout’s tent in south-east London

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attracted just over half the number of anticipated visitors. It has since remained closed and almost unused at a cost of several million pounds.

It will be handed over to private property speculators who, when they have made a killing, may pay something towards its original erection costs.

The government’s spending watchdog, the National Audit Office, has more than once sunk its sharp teeth into the Lottery grant distributors. In 1999, it savaged the major capital projects of the Arts Council’s Lottery spending. Only eight of the 15 projects had been finished or were scheduled to finish on time, with five running more than three months late. A staggering 12 of the 15 were over budget, six by more than 10 per cent. And eight of the 15 The Millennium Dome: the biggest misuse of public money in peacetime projects had applied for, and been granted, additional Lottery funding. says it now carries out random spot-checks on all funded This prompted the Arts Council to hire expensive consulprojects, and a separate risk-based approach sends it scurrytants to compare its projects with similar-sized private sector ing to investigate those projects where early-warning sirens construction projects. And guess what? The consultants told have sounded. And it now uses trusted partners such as the the council that its projects overran by only 17 per cent, comCountryside Commission and the British Trust for Conserpared with the private sector average of 18 per cent. You can vation Volunteers to help manage and monitor smaller prorely on consultants to tell you what you want to hear. jects, rather than just passing on grants to local groups and In April 2000, the National Audit Office snarled at the leaving them to it.

National Lottery Charities Board. The watchdog suggested And the fund distributors now try to give a helping hand that between £67m (15 per cent) and £145m (32 per cent) of to organisations that, if left to their own devices, would never the money spent had gone on projects that had not provided, be trusted with a grant. The second National Lottery Act or were only partly providing, the planned level of service or meant that, from 1998, the funders had to seek out organisaactivity. In 11 out of 132 cases, reports on the projects’ tions in parts of the country or from social or ethnic groups progress were either more than a year late or still outstanding. that had not received their fair share of funding under the And so it goes on. But this year, the National Audit Office earlier system. That had favoured white middle-class has also criticised the Lottery distributors for not throwing organisations with professionals experienced in putting away their cash fast enough. Each distributor sets a target for together bids, working in partnership and lobbying at the how much money it wants to spend and how fast. Going by right political levels. Dunmore says: “If anything, supporting these self-set targets, the NAO said that, in total, they should groups who find applying difficult on their own mitigates have spent an extra £450m by now. That’s money just lanagainst our risks.” guishing in their banks.

The Millennium Commission, which will itself close in Whatever the Lottery distributors do, they are damned: 2006, has ten projects still on the go. They include the Bernie damned if they spend money on projects that fail, damned if Grant arts centre and the Stephen Lawrence technical centre. they don’t spend money on certain types of project, and A spokeswoman said: “They are struggling. We are helping. damned if they don’t spend money fast enough.

Some of these communities don’t have access to the skills or All say they have learnt lessons from their failings. The Arts to the high-level support that can help drive these projects on.

Council says it now looks much harder at the long-term That can’t be said of the Bath Spa. That should have opened, viability of major projects and is rejecting outlandish and and we are disappointed.” exaggerated schemes. The Community Fund was this year And as she points out, the Lottery has funded 1,750,000 swallowed up by its fellow distributor, the New Opportuniprojects to the tune of £16bn and you have to take some risks. ties Fund, in what was described as a “merger”, to form the She adds: “The failures are way, way in the minority.”

Big Lottery Fund. Its chief executive, Stephen Dunmore,

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Give us what we want and stand back New Labour has made a mess of Lottery regulation. In the build-up to the next licence competition, it needs to keep its nose out. By MARK SLATTERY

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n April Fool’s Day 1999, the Lottery’s one-man full-time regulator, Oflot, was replaced by the National Lottery Commission, which comprised five part-time commissioners and a full-time chief executive. This was an effort on the part of the new Labour government to set two wrongs to right.

The first of those wrongs was the shortcomings of the regulators of privatised utilities such as water, gas and electricity, which had been created as single-person regulators. That they made decisions alone had left Labour, as an opposition party, feeling impotent.

In government, it set out to challenge the “cult of personality” by imposing new structures on the regulators.

The other wrong was the downfall of Peter Davis, the original Lottery regulator who was appointed back in 1993.

Davis had put Lottery regulation under Labour’s microscope by accepting free flights from GTech, Camelot’s software supplier, during the competition for the first Lottery licence. Later he became a high-profile victim of the libel case over whether Guy Snowden, then a director of Camelot and GTechUK, had bribed Richard Branson. The acrimony surrounding his resignation in February 1998 was the catalyst for new Labour to address the issue of regulation in the Lottery.

Labour’s desire for clean-fingered regulators ensured that the vetting regime was stringent and personal; financial connections were scrutinised and detailed checks ensured that none of them was remotely connected to the gambling industry.

But in his haste to replace Oflot, the then Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport, Chris Smith, left the new part-timers only a year to go from ignoramuses of gambling to experts

able to appoint a new National Lottery operator. In rugby terms, Smith had thrown the commissioners what is known as a “hospital pass”.

Rather than helping the already difficult situation, the government imposed strict rules. Because of its preference for the Lottery to be run by a not-for-profit operator, the regulators spent much of their time designing the bidding rules so that no such bodies were discouraged. It was not possible thereafter for the Secretary of State to take anything other than a close interest in how things were going.

Rather than helping the already difficult situation, the government imposed strict rules As a final twist, the chairmanship of the commission was subject to a maximum one-year term, the rationale being to dilute the “dangers” of an entrenched and dominant personality.

These were inauspicious beginnings for a tiny body about to referee a contest between two political giants. On every single front, the carefully crafted plan backfired. The first chair, Brian Pomeroy, handed over to Dame Helena Shovelton halfway through the process. She had to start from scratch, forging new relationships with bidders and commissioners alike.

The commission ran into trouble with the process, the timetable slipped, both bids were rejected, and in trying to broker an exclusive deal with Branson’s team, the Commission lost a judicial review to Camelot. Shovelton’s

eventual resignation came amid a national débâcle. The commission went through four chairs in one year.

In the aftermath, Gerald Kaufman’s culture select committee tore strips off the commission for its lack of expertise and experience, thus highlighting the deficiency in the thinking behind Labour’s initial appointments. And the vitriol poured on the commissioners, paid a mere £6,000 a year, has ensured that few sane people will wish to volunteer for the job in future.

One ironic benefit of the commission’s nightmare is that the flawed model used by Labour will surely never be used for any other regulatory body.

And the government is now pledged to undoing its failed experiment by revising the governance of the commission in its gambling bill. The rotating chair will be ditched. And it has quietly shaved down the vetting requirements.

But many of the flaws still exist and make it difficult for the commission to carry out an intensive competition process. It is uniquely Labour’s regulator; it follows a unique Labour model. This puts a premium on it to get the process right, and the risk of fallout on to Labour from any mistakes increases the chances of ministerial interference.

The next licence will begin late into what could be Labour’s third term – January 2009 – but the competition process is already starting. For its own benefit, the government should learn from past experience. This time around, it should give the regulator what it needs to do the job properly, then shut up and stand well back.

Mark Slattery is former head of communications at the National Lottery Commission

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How to run faster Despite the British success at Athens, coaches still want more cash for elite athletes. By NICK GREENSLADE

EPA/ “PA”PHOTOS

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t is not often that John Major makes a foray back into political debate, but the tenth anniversary of the National Lottery has prompted a rare public outburst. The former prime minister has launched an attack on the government for having “raided the Lottery fund for programmes that historically have been met out of central taxation. Overall, Labour’s behaviour has been nothing short of grand larceny.”

It was ironic that, on the same day Major was being held up as the great defender of the Lottery, Ivan Lawrence, the former Conservative MP whose private members’ bill in 1991 had opened the way for its creation, recalled his leader’s lukewarm attitude: “I saw him [Major] quite often, but he never said, ‘Good luck with your bill’. He wasn’t wildly enthusiastic.”

What should concern us more, however, is how existing funds are being distributed. Or not distributed. A report produced by the Comptroller and Auditor General in July revealed that £2.7bn was unused (though most of it was allocated) in the National Lottery Distribution Fund – £202m of which should have gone to Sport England.

This revelation was particularly poignant when British athletes, so often the poor relations of national sport, were about to depart for Athens to compete in the Olympics.

These games were the first at which we could fully gauge, after several years of funding, the benefits of the Lottery grants offered to our elite athletes. As many as 550 Olympians and Paralympians received an annual stipend of up to £50,000 a year to cover massage, coaching and transport, as well as additional sums to meet living costs. In total, £20m of Lottery money has poured into their cause in the past five years.

A haul of 30 medals represented the

best performance since 1928 and a slight improvement on Sydney 2000. Feelgood stories were provided by the success of runner Kelly Holmes and the men’s coxless fours rowing team, and the inevitable parade through London ensued. But we should not let this divert our attention from the bigger picture.

Before the games, the sprinter Darren Campbell claimed that Lottery money was creating a “comfort zone” for many

Rare success: the joy of Kelly Holmes distracts us from the bigger picture

supposedly elite competitors who preferred to squander their windfalls “on PlayStation games and DVDs”.

Could Campbell have had in mind his team-mate Mark Lewis-Francis? A junior world champion in 2000, LewisFrancis’s underachievement since has been symptomatic of all too many young British athletes of late. This summer, for the first time ever, Britain left the world junior athletics championships without a single medal.

Why has this happened? What appears to be absent is a coherent plan for how the money should be channelled. True, many ramshackle sports

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grounds have been renovated, and the government has launched a belated campaign to combat national obesity and indolence. But as Major would point out, these are initiatives that should be funded by local and central government. There is a real danger that resources which should be set aside to assist leading sportsmen and women are being depleted as a result. Furthermore, it is all very well doling out what cash there is to “elite” athletes, but unless there are elite programmes in place for them to follow, it will be wasted.

This point was made by Colin Moynihan, the former “miniature of sport” (as he was nicknamed), who has re-emerged as a persuasive shadow minister in the Lords: “We are the only bidding country for the 2012 games where funding into world-class programmes is decreasing . . . programmes have been cut, shelved or haven’t got off the ground.” The UK swimming coach Bill Sweetenham (an Australian) recently observed that his team could never hope to gain ground on their Antipodean rivals while the latter received an annual £2m more.

Yet it doesn’t have to be like this. The World Cup-winning rugby supremo Clive Woodward has recalled how he made countless demands for more money during his time in charge of the England team. On some occasions, his bosses at the Rugby Football Union delivered; on others, they did not.

Woodward’s response to setbacks was to use his initiative. Can’t afford to send a chef to Australia to cook for my boys?

Don’t worry, I’ll find a sponsor myself.

Not going to pay for my players to have laptops? Fine. I’ll use my contacts in the computer industry to get them. All the Lottery money in the world won’t make a difference unless there is a Woodward-type character in charge of our Olympians, in charge at Sport England, and in charge of the Department for Culture, Media and Sport. But there’s a good chance you will win the Lottery before this happens.

Nick Greenslade is a contributing editor of the Observer Sport Monthly

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Where has all the money gone?

In the past decade, the National Lottery has sold more than 40 billion tickets, and around £16bn has gone to more than 180,000 causes.

Here we show how different regions and sectors have fared East Midlands Arts £70.4m on 1,509 projects Charities £166.3m on 5,945 projects Heritage £131m on 971 projects Millennium £63.8m on 142 projects Sports £189.4m on 1,759 projects Health, Education, Environment £118.9m on 1,410 projects Total £739.8 on 11,736 projects

Eastern Arts £79.3m on 1,650 projects Charities £171.5m on 5,686 projects Heritage £179.3m on 972 projects Millennium £55.4m on 176 projects Sports £136.9m on 1,453 projects Health, Education, Environment £125.9m on 1,406 projects Total £748.3m on 11,343 projects

London Arts £847m on 5,254 projects Charities £618.7m on 10,271 projects Heritage £599.4m on 1,138 projects Millennium £947.6m on 270 projects Sports £360.5m on 1,611 projects Health, Education, Environment £299.5m on 2,018 projects Total £3,672.7m on 20,562 projects

North East Arts £148m on 1,237 projects Charities £153.8m on 5,496 projects Heritage £128.7m on 531 projects Millennium £64.9m on 92 projects Sports £120.1m on 904 projects Health, Education, Environment £142.2m on 1,027 projects Total £757.6m on 9,287 projects

North West Arts £211.1m on 2,693 projects Charities £315.4m on 8,362 projects Heritage £291.4m on 998 projects Millennium £82.4 on 179 projects Sports £333.5m on 1,989 projects Health, Education, Environment £272.1m on 2,024 projects Total £1,506m on 16,245 projects

Northern Ireland Arts £44.9m on 1,312 projects Charities £119.4m on 3,265 projects Heritage £77.1m on 443 projects Millennium £81.5m on 295 projects Sports £42.8m on 924 projects Health, Education, Environment £95.1m on 1,239 projects Total £460.8m on 7,478 projects

South East Arts £164m on 2,908 projects Charities £242.6m on 7,174 projects Heritage £241.2m on 1,197 projects Millennium £94.1m on 234 projects Sports £258m on 1,924 projects Health, Education, Environment £173m on 2,169 projects Total £1,173.1m on 15,606 projects

South West Arts £119.2m on 2,499 projects Charities £187.8m on 8,355 projects Heritage £223.2m on 1,088 projects Millennium £128m on 162 projects Sports £196.2m on 1,908 projects Health, Education, Environment £145.8m on 1,787 projects Total £1,000.1m on 15,799 projects

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Scotland Arts £205.0m on 6,047 projects Charities £281.7m on 9,555 projects Heritage £309.9m on 1,605 projects Millennium £242.1m on 490 projects Sports £126m on 2,664 projects Health, Education, Environment £224.4m on 2,795 projects Total £1,389.2m on 23,156 projects

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Wales Arts £117.6m on 4,236 projects Charities £152.6m on 4,568 projects Heritage £128.3m on 914 projects Millennium £127.9m on 592 projects Sports £106.9m on 1,041 projects Health, Education, Environment £109.3m on 1,923 projects Total £742.6m on 13,274 projects

West Midlands Source: www.lottery.culture.gov.uk Search the website for more details

Arts £213.5m on 2,533 projects Charities £236.1m on 7,380 projects Heritage £162.4m on 912 projects Millennium £112.7m on 157 projects Sports £144.2m on 1,935 projects Health, Education, Environment £195.8m on 1,785 projects Total £1,064.6m on 14,702 projects

Yorkshire and Humberside Arts £109.2m on 2,470 projects Charities £218.5m on 6,778 projects Heritage £210m on 929 projects Millennium £130.8m on 156 projects Sports £183.6m on 1,553 projects Health, Education, Environment £185m on 1,633 projects Total £1,037.1m on 13,519 projects

Grants by distributing body Arts Council England £1,857,701,129 Arts Council of Northern Ireland £45,975,331 Arts Council of Wales £116,651,941 Awards For All (England) Joint Scheme £105,351,490 Community Fund £2,763,487,283 Heritage Lottery Fund £2,681,944,554 Millennium Commission £2,131,324,379 New Opportunities Fund £2,091,002,787 Scottish Arts Council £205,889,934 Scottish Screen £6,754,099 Sport England £1,994,866,622 Sport Scotland £176,964,116 Sports Council for Northern Ireland £42,913,006 Sports Council for Wales £109,135,301 UK Film Council £100,994,906 UK Sport £126,172,939 Veteran’s Pot £1,060,388 Total £14,558,190,205

Other (not categorised by region) Arts £4.8m on 151 projects Charities £4.4m on 63 projects Heritage £5,000 on 1 project Millennium £1,600 on 2 projects Sports £252m on 6,827 projects Health, Education, Environment £5.2m on 65 projects

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The National Lottery Helping Hand Awards T he search is on to find the UK’s favourite National Lottery-funded projects or individuals with the launch of the first ever Helping Hand Awards, voted for by the public. The awards, which will be presented at Tate Modern on 6 November, celebrate the great diversity of National Lottery projects and demonstrate just how far Lottery money has gone in making a real difference to people’s lives. Highlights from the awards ceremony will be broadcast on BBC1 on 6 November. The results will also be announced on www.lotterygoodcauses.org.uk. The shortlisted nominees in each of the six categories are as follows.

National Lottery Helping Hand Children’s Champion Award Open to any projectthat has directly benefited children or young people The Active Citizenship Restorative Education Schools Peer Mediation Project (the Peer Mediation Project) was set up in 1998 to reduce bullying and aggressive confrontation in the playground by training schoolchildren to become mediators. The project has received a total of £266,254 Lottery funding between 1998 and 2005.

Piloted in Swansea Bay and Neath Port Talbot by Mediation South & West Wales, the project has been rolled out across 24 schools in south-west Wales. Several thousand pupils have taken part in the project and all believe that flare-ups between pupils have declined.

The New Bolton Lads’ and Girls’ Club’s £5m state-of-the-art

The Lowry in Salford

centre caters for 4- to 21-year-olds, mainly from the most disadvantaged areas of Bolton. For a 40p entrance fee, the youngsters have access to a wide range of activities and sports. The club also offers affordable childcare before and after school, and is open seven days a week throughout the year.

Without Lottery funding, the club would still be housed in old, outdated and unsuitable accommodation, and could never have reached the scale of activities it now runs. It is used weekly by 2,500 young people, 180 of whom have disabilities.

Sleep Scotland supports families with children with special needs for whom sleeplessness is a particular problem.

Sleep Scotland breaks the families’ cycle of interminably interrupted nights by offering them sleep counselling through trained professionals. The project received a total of £466,475 in Lottery funding between 1998 and 2002.

This has enabled the training of 195 sleep counsellors and the establishment of 119 sleep clinics, stretching from Orkney to Dumfries and Stornoway to Aberdeen. A total of 734 families have been given an intensive sleep programme, representing 755 children with special needs and their 782 siblings. The project has given support to more than 2,000 professionals and at least 1,836 parents.

National Lottery Helping Hand Amazing Space Award Open to any project that has transformed a publicly accessible place – for example, a public building, park, monument or landmark The Lowry has been granted £80.25m of Lottery funding since 1996. The arts complex houses two theatres,

© NICK FELLOWS

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exhibition galleries, a restaurant, cafés, bars, gift shop and conference facilities.

The Lowry is part of a regeneration project for the former docks in Salford, Greater Manchester. Salford City Council bought the disused docklands area of Salford Quays in 1983. Councillors wanted better housing, schools and jobs for the area, and saw a new arts complex as one way to unlock the jobs and inward investment they needed.

Once Lottery funding had been secured, building began in April 1997. The Lowry opened to the public three years later and has been hailed an enormous success, bringing major social and economic benefits to the area.

It is one of the most successful regeneration projects in Europe.

IWM

St George’s Market, originally a butter and egg market, was designed by Belfast Corporation’s city surveyor JC Bretland between 1890 and 1896. It later became a wholesale fruit and vegetable market and then a retail variety market.

By the 1990s, St George’s Market had become very dilapidated.

The Lottery contributed £2m to the £3.5m cost of refurbishing the market. The restoration has been faithful to the original, with the classical red-brick and carved stone exterior unchanged. Inside, the main features were retained and the Victorian iron roof restored.

Additional facilities created include some offices, six shops, a restaurant and a waste management area.

The building now houses a traditional variety market with 248 stalls on Fridays and a specialist food and flower market on Saturdays, which between them attract almost 30,000 shoppers each week.

The Millennium Coastal Park began as an attempt by Llanelli Borough Council (now superseded by Carmarthenshire County Council) and the Welsh Development Agency to regenerate 22km and 2,000 acres of contaminated and neglected industrial wasteland and coastal plain.

The park opened to the public in June 2002 and is free of charge to visitors. It stretches from Pembrey Country Park in the west to the National Wetlands Centre of Wales at Penclacwydd in the east. The project received £13.75m Lottery funding in 1995.

What was, just over seven years ago, one of the most polluted coastlines in the UK now attracts more than half a million visitors a year.

National Lottery Helping Hand Inspiration Award Designed to celebrate the most innovative and creative use of Lottery funding – for example, a work of art or poetry The Holocaust Exhibition at the Imperial War Museum in London is the first of its kind in a national museum in the UK, focusing exclusively on one of the most disturbing episodes of recent history. Since opening in 2000, the exhibition has already attracted well over a million visitors.

The project received a total of £12.624m Lottery funding between 1996 and 2002, which contributed to the redevelopment of the museum building and the Holocaust Exhibition. Much of the money was spent on sourcing and purchasing artefacts and building exhibits. One of the most important resources was personal testimony: contemporary film and sound and video recordings of eyewitness accounts by Holocaust survivors.

The Holocaust Exhibition, Imperial War Museum

The Community Law Centre runs a Mobile Legal Office delivering free legal services to isolated rural communities in Cumbria that would otherwise have little or no access to solicitors. The Carlisle-based Community Law Centre was set up in 1990 to offer free services to those needing legal help on a range of issues. The centre proved hugely successful, but many vulnerable clients were still unable to receive the help they needed because large areas of Cumbria are geographically extremely isolated.

Lottery funding of £840,000 enabled the law centre to source and fit out a large van to take lawyers to isolated communities. In the period between 1996 and 2002, when the Lottery was funding the service, it handled more than 19,000 queries, undertook more than 1,600 cases and won nearly £450,000 for clients.

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Quotient Diagnostics has developed a technology that promises to revolutionise how diabetes is monitored and managed. They are producing an instrument to provide an on-the-spot reading of glycated haemoglobin, a vital indicator of a diabetic’s condition, known as the A1C test.

The technology is based on research done in the late 1990s at London’s St Bartholomew’s Hospital. The Bart’s team devised a chemistry capable of measuring A1C in a tiny blood sample in a matter of minutes, but they found they hadn’t the means to commercialise it. So, in 2002, Quotient Diagnostics – set up specifically for this purpose – bought an exclusive licence from Bart’s to do the job, with the hospital receiving a royalty. The project received £90,000 of Lottery funding in 2003 from Nesta (National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts). The Quotient system will be on the market by the end of 2005.

National Lottery Helping Hand Local Legend Award For the best contribution made by an individual or community group at a grassroots level

in all their varied forms, to tackle tough social issues and personal distress.

Project Intrepid received £53,164 Lottery funding between 2002 and 2004. Its work involves sessions with “special needs”: children with chronic or life-threatening illnesses, young offenders, the bereaved, those with learning difficulties or physical disabilities, those who self-harm, street sex workers and many more. Activities include: mask-making, music, printmaking, scene-painting, drama, film and video, and full-scale theatrical productions.

Inclusions grew out of an organisation called Community Link-Up, based in Harrow, London, and inspired by one of its volunteers, David Gawn. Link-Up and the Inclusions Project received £125,014 of Lottery funding between 2000 and 2003. David, who is 27 and has cerebral palsy, wanted to do something about the fact that many people with disabilities were spending five days a week stuck in day centres. He knew that, given the right support, people like him could achieve much more than society allowed.

The Lottery grant enabled Link-Up to secure David in a part-time paid post, to develop Inclusions. The project’s work includes educational and vocational training, work placements, helping people access social activities in the community and building their confidence to use public transport, to boost their practical Community Can Cycle, Glasgow independence.

Community Can Cycle (CCC) was founded in October 2000 on Glasgow’s Castlemilk estate by a 35-year-old unemployed painter and decorator, Jim O’Donnell. Jim sensed that cycling was an important recreation which could give children a taste of independence, but that many low-income parents in the area were not able to afford bikes. CCC was born out of his idea of collecting the kids’ discarded lemonade bottles and Coca-Cola cans for recycling to generate the money needed for spare parts such as saddles and tyres.

CCC has gone from a volunteer set-up to employing five people full-time, including Jim, who became project manager. In 2002, the project established its own recycling centre. CCC received a £139,532 Lottery grant (which paid for three full-time staff).

Project Intrepid, formed by Peter Harris and Julie Walker, is an arm of the arts company Wolf & Water, whose patch is the south-west. The project uses the arts and artists,

National Lottery Helping Hand National Hero Award For a person, famous throughout the UK, whose achievements have been made possible by Lottery funding Laurie Symes, representing 100,000 surviving veterans of the Second World War Laurie Symes was 24 when he landed at Gold Beach in Normandy with the Territorial Battalion of the 7th Hampshire Regiment in 1944. Later he was involved in Operation Market Garden in 1944 – a plan devised by Field Marshal Montgomery, who was convinced it would help win the war by the end of 1944. Up to 35,000 British and US troops were flown behind enemy lines near the Dutch town of Eindhoven and attempted to capture the eight bridges that spanned a network of canals. Unfortunately German resistance proved stronger than expected, and in the first nine days of what

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became known as the battle of Arnhem, the number of men killed, wounded and missing reached 17,000.

Ceremonies are held every September in the Netherlands to commemorate the battle. For this year’s 60th anniversary, a £52,165 National Lottery Grant to the Market Garden Veterans Association paid for 105 veterans and their families to make the trip, helping to keep alive the memory of all those who fought in the war.

Simon Weston sustained 49 per cent burns during the bombing of the supply ship Sir Galahad by Argentine planes during the Falklands war in 1982. Simon brings his personal experience of what it is like to reach rock bottom and yet claw your way back to Weston Spirit, the youth charity he founded in 1988 with Paul Oginsky and Ben Harrison.

The charity helps 13- to 25-year-olds in some of the most deprived areas in the UK. Operating from 11 centres around the UK, it works to improve the youngsters’ self-confidence and self-esteem. Through a long-term membership programme, innovative one-day courses and a range of special projects, Weston Spirit supports young people to build their social and life skills so they can transform their own lives and reach their full potential.

Kelly Holmes, in August 2004, became the third woman in the history of the modern Olympics to win both the 800m and the 1500m, and only the second British track athlete to win two or more medals at one Games.

Kelly gave up athletics at 18 to concentrate on her army career and then struggled with injury when she did return.

In the four-year run-up to Athens, Kelly and 63 other athletes were supported by the World Class Performance Programme with £11.4m worth of kit, travel expenses, medical and physio back-up and coaching contributed by the National Lottery.

National Lottery Helping Hand UK Life Award

NICK TURNER

Designed to recognise the greatest overall impact to UK life made by the larger and most popular Lottery-funded projects Bristol-based charity Sustrans is the pioneer of the National Cycle Network, a huge series of signed cycling and walking routes linking communities to schools, stations and city centres, as well as to beautiful countryside.

Safer routes, it believes, are key to encouraging more people to walk and get on their bikes, encouraging healthier lifestyles, reducing car congestion and lowering pollution levels. In 2003, 126 million trips were made on the National Cycle Network and nearly one-third of those replaced a car trip.

Sustrans, pioneers of the National Cycle Network

To date, Sustrans has co-ordinated the construction of 8,200 miles of the network. The project remains on course to open 10,000 miles of route by the end of 2005, and Sustrans hopes that further paths will be added to this Network in future.

Tate Modern opened in May 2000 and became instantly iconic, partly thanks to the extraordinary building in which it is housed – the old Bankside Power Station. The building provided a brilliant and unique space in which to exhibit the very best of contemporary international art.

Tate Modern has hosted many successful exhibitions including the “Unilever Series: Olafur Eliasson”, which attracted 2.2 million visitors during its showing between October 2003 and March 2004.

Locally, Tate Modern has sought to reach a wider audience through its Community Advocates Programme, where members of the community organise informal sessions with local groups of mothers and toddlers and the elderly, for example, encouraging them to get to know the gallery’s collection and make return visits.

The Eden Project, since opening in March 2001, has grown to employ 600 local people, 380 of them permanently, with more than five million visitors in that time. Independent figures show that the futuristic “biomes”, built in a former china clay pit, have injected half a billion pounds into the local and regional economy.

The project, showcasing flora and fauna from around the world, has benefited from £55.4m of Lottery funding.

The Eden Project has worked with communities around the world in gathering thousands of plants for the “humid tropics” and “warm temperate biomes” that are part of a 35-acre site in Cornwall. The reclaimed china clay pit around them has been landscaped and transformed into the “cool temperate zone”, where plants such as rice and tea grow.

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Great Lottery-funded projects under £5,000 Once Upon a Time is a prison-based project in Leeds. It allows sentenced men, many of whom are illiterate, the chance to choose bedtime stories for their children. They read the story into a tape recorder, and the tape is then sent to the child, accompanied by the book.

This makes a huge difference to children and mothers.

And the fathers, apart from acquiring new skills, learn to make a connection with their children, which many of them have never experienced before.

Carmarthenshire Domestic Abuse provides

community support for people, in particular women and children, who have suffered domestic abuse. The Lottery award will go towards lifeline alarms, which will greatly improve the lives of people at risk.

Scotholme School Allotment Club is putting Lottery funding into a “Sow & Grow” project using “Heritage Seeds” of organic vegetables. Once grown, the vegetables are picked and cooked in the school kitchen as part of a healthy lunch. The children have also created wildlife and flower gardens.

Sensory Sailors is a project set up by a group of

friends, one of whom is blind, to refurbish a buccaneer yacht called the Arctic Tern. It took more than two years to complete, after which they began to give sailing lessons to people with sensory impairments. A large number of disadvantaged children helped with the refurbishment of the yacht. Sailing in her has given them a confidence they would not otherwise have had.

Children’s War Diaries collects children’s war

diaries from conflicts in the 20th and 21st centuries. Zlata Filipovic, one of the project’s founders, kept a diary as a child during the civil war in Sarajevo in 1992. It was later published in 36 languages. The group hopes to publish its own collection of war diaries at the end of this year.

Herstory, History, Our Story dealt with issues

surrounding homophobia within the young black community by means of a radio documentary. It looked particularly at issues of language and misplaced beliefs.

People were afraid to contribute to the programme, so the project’s founder devised a method of distorting the sound to make the voices unrecognisable. She hopes it helped participants to understand themselves better and to accept homosexuality in their communities.

A game of give and take The Lottery has helped charities to innovate, boosting their incomes rather than impoverishing them.

But a merger threatens to change all that, writes STEPHEN BUBB

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hen the Lottery was established a decade ago, charity leaders feared a decrease in charities’ income, as individuals opted to buy a ticket rather than make a donation. Luckily, these concerns have proved groundless.

While the proportion of the population giving has remained steady at just under 65 per cent, the average monthly donation is increasing, fuelled by tax breaks such as Gift Aid. Moreover, of the £1.2bn raised by the Lottery last year, charities received £285m. Understandably, the Lottery has gained enormous popularity throughout the charity sector, having

The government’s decision to form the Big Lottery Fund was made in the face of vociferous opposition made possible a huge range of worthwhile projects, from providing support to the elderly to revitalising urban parks.

At the Lottery’s birth, politicians on all sides agreed that a significant proportion of the “good cause” money raised should go to the nation’s charity and not-for-profit sector. At 28 per cent of ticket revenue, this was – and still is – a sizeable sum. Crucially, Lottery money would be additional to, not a replacement for, any funding the government wished to allocate through general taxation.

The broadness of legislation governing the National Lottery Charities Board reflected the intention that government should not be able to pick and choose causes following its own agenda. This approach encouraged charities to identify their own priorities and develop new projects to meet citizens’ needs. A culture of “bottom up” innovation characterised the National Lottery Charities Board and its successor, the Community Fund. The latter’s willingness to fund sometimes controversial services won it many friends in the charity sector.

But recent years have been marked by a steady erosion of the core principle of “additionality”, which was designed to prevent Lottery funds substituting government spending. In

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that the Big Lottery July 1998, the New Fund would adopt Opportunities Fund the government-led was established, which strategy of the New made grants to educaOpportunities Fund, tion, health and envirather than the Comronmental projects. As munity Fund’s more the fund spent millions open approach. Tessa of pounds putting Jowell, the Secretary scanners into hospitals of State for Culture, and fruit into schools, Media and Sport, the line between govannounced that all ernment money and Lottery funding would Lottery money began fit within three broad to blur. themes: promoting A clear tension well-being, commuemerged between two nity safety and comviews of the Lottery. munity learning. These The government wants bear a close resemit to take a strategic blance to government approach to funding, priority areas: health, and to complement Back to the begging bowl? crime and education. existing government Charity chief executives reacted angrily to the announcespending on central priorities. Others favour a more demandment. The Big Lottery Fund strenuously denied that the led approach, which supports the funding priorities of charithemes would restrict its funding decisions in any way. But as ties and voluntary groups.

Nicholas Young, chief executive of the British Red Cross, The media furore over some of the Community Fund’s commented: “This flatly contradicts a lot of the praise that more controversial grants illustrated the problem of close government has heaped on the sector, and goes against everygovernmental involvement in funding decisions. Grantthing we believe. Much depends on how the categories are making in support of politically sensitive groups, such as drawn, but there’s no point having categories that don’t asylum-seekers or young offenders, becomes more difficult restrict anything, so I fear the worst.” when such decisions are seen to be made, or specifically endorsed, by the government.

In February last year, the government announced the espite these apparent setbacks, government ministers merger of the Community Fund with the New Opportunicontinue to believe that around two-thirds of the Big ties Fund, a decision that was made in the face of vociferous Lottery Fund’s spend should go to charities and the opposition from charities. Furthermore, a consultation of Lottery minister, Estelle Morris, has suggested that this could government and MPs had revealed “no support for reducing be independently audited. or merging the number of distributors as they, too, thought However, increased government control is a hallmark of that it would result in a loss of expertise as well as being costly current drafts of legislation to govern the Big Lottery Fund. to implement”.

The fund will have an obligation to comply with the Secretary Even more surprising was the rapidity with which the of State’s directions in exercising any of its powers. Directions merger progressed. Two separate bodies, their distinct remits may even relate to specific purposes or persons. laid down in legislation, seemed to vanish almost at the The Association of Chief Executives of Voluntary Organistroke of an administrator’s pen. An “administrative merger” sations has argued that Lottery money should be distributed has taken place far in advance of formal legislation. Charities through an independent foundation, with channels of govwere further confused by the government’s fragmented ernment control made formal and transparent. This would approach to consultation, which took place after the merger prove popular with the public: 73 per cent of respondents to had been announced. an ICM opinion poll commissioned by the National Council Putting aside their disappointment over the tokenistic confor Voluntary Organisations said that an independent public sultation, charity leaders saw the creation of the Big Lottery body should decide how the money is spent. The government Fund as a significant opportunity for the sector. They hoped must explore this option if the Lottery is to remain the powit would secure considerable savings by removing adminiserful force for good it has always been. trative duplication, and show itself to be more strategic, innovative and accessible than either of its parents.

Stephen Bubb is head of Acevo, the Association of Chief Unfortunately, early developments have sparked fears Executives of Voluntary Organisations

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Never fear: big is better Concerns about the creation of the Big Lottery Fund are being addressed, reassures the fund’s policy director VANESSA POTTER

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he lives of millions of people in thousands of communities across the UK have been changed for the better by the Lottery. These people haven’t won jackpots. Instead, projects and ideas that grew out of their needs and experiences have secured more than £5bn in Lottery funding from the New Opportunities Fund and the Community Fund. Wherever you live, there will be local projects making life better for children, for deprived groups, for just about everybody. Whatever your interests, priorities or leisure pursuits, you would be hard pushed not to find a Lottery project supporting them.

But ten years of experience in distributing money to good causes shows that there are better ways of doing it.

The creation of the Big Lottery Fund, by merging the Community Fund and the New Opportunities Fund, is a response to this challenge.

Most people are still unaware of the diversity of what has been funded. On the rare occasions when a project fails, or where some people feel money is going to something that should not be a priority, the huge success of the Lottery in supporting good causes can be overlooked. The Big Lottery Fund will be working with the other distributing bodies, and with Camelot, to raise public awareness. The National Lottery’s tenth birthday is an opportunity for this, but it won’t stop there. The Big Lottery Fund is working on initiatives that will widen public involvement in Lottery distribution, including citizens’ juries and local advisory panels.

The distributors of Lottery funds know that people still find it hard to get through our application processes, even though the creation of Awards for All has greatly simplified applying for relatively small grants. The Big Lottery Fund is examining ways in which access to funding can be made as easy as possible, including greater use of the internet and other electronic solutions.

There’s another major challenge for Lottery distributors: what happens to projects after our funding of them comes to an end? There have been real advances in this area, with funding being offered for up to ten years in some cases, and much more emphasis on fitting into wider partnerships and funding opportunities. But there are no easy answers to this. The Big Lottery Fund will be looking at how it can build on successful practice, and avoid the danger that projects or groups may be “set up to fail”.

We must take a sensible and consistent approach to funding what communities and groups say they want and

need, rather than making them design everything into “projects”; and we need to be prepared to fund all of the costs associated with the work we are funding.

Perhaps one of our biggest failings is that we have become risk-adverse. This has happened for all the right reasons, reflecting a concern that public funds should be spent in the most effective way. But Lottery funding is different to other public funding, and should be viewed differently. The Lottery should fund the new, the exciting, the icing on the cake. But we must also make space to fund the “what if?” and the “maybe, just maybe”. As a nation, we should see Lottery funding as an opportunity to test what works, find solutions to the old problems and invest in people and groups who will lead this change.

There has been considerable debate about the creation of the Big Lottery Fund, much of which has focused on process rather than policy. Quite understandably, there has been concern over the future of Lottery funding for the voluntary and community sectors. We have responded to this by saying that 60 to 70 per cent of our funding will go directly to this area – a fantastic win for these sectors.

There has also been concern that the merger is a government takeover of half of Lottery funds. This is simply wrong. As a non-departmental public body distributing a large amount of funding, the Big Lottery Fund needs to have a good relationship with the government, which includes agreeing strategic direction.

But the Secretary of State has made very clear that the design, development and implementation of programmes – including what and who is funded – will be a matter for the fund, in consultation with all interested parties.

Our experience to date suggests that while these issues are important, they are not the main interest of the people with whom we work in communities. At our public consultation events, the enthusiasm and interest people have displayed about what we do and how we work has been very inspiring. What people tell us is that they want us to be about making a real difference in local communities, tackling disadvantage and engaging the public in discussion about where funding goes. We have a wonderful opportunity to build on what the Big Lottery Fund and other distributors have already achieved, to make sure the next ten years are even better.

Vanessa Potter is the Big Lottery Fund’s director of policy and external relations

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From Wraggs to riches DANNY BUCKLAND talks to a winning couple who have shared their good fortune ottery winners Ray and a feeling that you want to give Barbara Wragg had back because you are so worked hard all their fortunate and privileged to lives and spare cash was not have won.” the stuff to be thrown around The Wraggs are now lightly. The roofing supervisor organising their annual and nursing assistant were Christmas panto treat for always in work as they hundreds of children in their brought up three children, but home city. They liaise with they never really threatened inner-city schools and are to go near the 40 per cent tax there on the day, sharing bracket for high earners. the laughter and toilet visit But winning £7.6m in duties for more than January 2000 had little effect 200 youngsters. on their attitudes and, even “I suppose it is selfish in a though they have spent way, because we get an Barbara and Ray Wragg £5.5m in four years, they are awful lot out of it as well, just happy that the lion’s share seeing their faces. But we has gone to family, friends and the numerous charities believe strongly that putting back into the community is they support. something worthwhile,” Barbara says. “Loads of Lottery The Wraggs, from Sheffield, are ideal examples of the winners spread their money back into charities and good Lottery’s ripple effect, with jackpot money radiating out from causes, and a lot of that goes unseen.” the lucky winners.

The Wraggs have a deep personal reason for their support “It was amazing to win. We’d always been OK, but we’d of the Western Green Hospital teen cancer unit. Their never had that much money spare, so it was an incredible daughter Amanda was diagnosed with a rare form of amount – more than you could count,” says Barbara, 62, cancer at 17 and had to be treated on an adult ward. who spent 22 years of her life working night shifts in a “It was devastating,” says Barbara, who has five hospital. “We knew our family would be secure and we could grandchildren. “We had this brilliant doctor and he removed move to a new house, and that was a wonderful feeling, but the cancer and had to take away four inches of her tibia. She both of us wanted to do more with the money. It struck us also had chemotherapy over a three-week period, followed both, right from the moment we won. We wanted to do by five weeks of radiotherapy. But it is difficult for children to something for people who needed it. It was a strong desire.” be on mixed adult wards when they are ill. She recovered Barbara and Ray, 65, have had “the time of their lives” and is a healthy 29-year-old thanks to the work of the doctors since the win, but they also support a sweep of charities that and staff there. It is so much better for the teenagers to be have touched theirs and friends’ lives. They prefer to donate somewhere they feel comfortable, but there are precious to several projects than make a single donation to one few of these units around.” organisation. They also get actively involved in fundraising, The couple have swapped the three-bed council house and Ray even abseiled the 300ft Royal Hallamshire Hospital they lived in most of their married lives, which they bought for Tower, in Sheffield, to generate sponsorship. £10,000 in the 1980s, for a five-bedroom house, and Ray “We really enjoy being involved, but I was scared about now drives a Range Rover. The couple, who have bought that one,” says Barbara. “He’d had a couple of falls when he homes for their children and set up other family members was working and I couldn’t sleep the night before. I was and friends, enjoy luxury cruises and holidays. crying on the way there and telling him just to hand over the “Sometimes I look around my house and cannot believe I sponsorship money, but he was determined to do it and he live here. The Lottery has been brilliant for us and our family,” did, even though he was 64! adds Barbara. “It is wonderful to be able to enjoy what “The Lottery win means we can support a group of causes money can buy and it is an honour to be able to support that need help, and it feels such a natural thing to do. There is charities with that money.”

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A right that is wrong Protecting winners has become a straitjacket on good PR, writes MARK SLATTERY

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he time when Iorworth Hoare, the £7m “jackpot rapist”, is no doubt busy compiling his Christmas shopping list is a good moment for the government to reconsider the issue of jackpot winners’ privacy. It may wish that it was not possible for the likes of Hoare to be “outed”, thereby sullying the Lottery’s reputation. But there is less of a case in favour of a blanket right to anonymity for the many articulate, more or less likeable people who win on the Lottery.

Why should paying a pound for a ticket in a draw – a contract as for any other good or service – bestow a right to privacy if we should be lucky enough to win?

The “right of privacy” is imposed by the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport on the National Lottery Commission, which in turn enforces it upon Camelot. In the Lottery’s early days, when jackpot levels were unprecedented, this provision was justified. The media hunted for major winners, even when they tried to avoid publicity. Would they find themselves being blackmailed, hijacked, burgled or just plain bothered? With so much uncertainty, caution was appropriate.

At the start, the press was more of a problem than the criminal fraternity.

During 1995, after a tabloid paper leaked a jackpot winner’s identity in Blackburn, Peter Davis, the then Lottery regulator, commissioned a special review. It remains the only instance of serious concern, and Camelot was cleared of any impropriety.

The National Lottery was set up as a form of gambling that did not look, taste or feel like gambling. Time – together with the government’s planned liberalisation of the gambling sector – is dissolving the differences

between the Lottery and its competitors. The Lottery has to compete hard to keep players. This means enabling it to promote itself properly.

Protecting winners has now become a straitjacket on good PR. Less than a year ago, Camelot said: “Halting [the quarterly] sales decline has been driven by four key factors [one being] . . . taking a much more proactive approach to publicity, with a substantial increase in positive media coverage of Lottery winners . . . ” If this is to continue, the right to privacy has to go.

We are used to large jackpots, and

The Lottery’s winners are its best adverts. Their smiles are genuine concern about how winners would be treated has receded. Jackpots are often shared by syndicates and jackpot sizes have shrunk. The National Lottery has become part of our everyday lives. In fact, “protection” doesn’t really apply in most cases anyway. If a win is not substantial, the claim process involves going into a public place such as a post office or newsagent to claim it, unless one claims by post. These winners don’t need protection – it’s no different from winning on a slot machine.

But privacy is not necessary for jackpot winners, either. Jackpot prizes are growing in other sectors, and there is no justification for Lottery winners being singled out and wrapped up in cotton wool. It is common for prize competitions to commit significant winners to receiving publicity. And publicity does not put off callers to Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?, or The

Vault, which also make big payouts.

Freedom from this restriction would allow Camelot – and any successor – to compete with the ever-encroaching leisure and gambling market by utilising fully its most potent marketing asset: the winners themselves. Their winning experience keeps alive the hopes of many others by reminding them of the possibility and the benefits of a win.

Winners should not be thrown without regard into the media’s oncoming headlights. Having no right to anonymity is not the same as an obligation to undertake publicity: it is a question of reasons ahead of rights. The reasons should be listened to.

A duty of care on the operator should replace the blanket protection and thus avoid exposing winners who are vulnerable or whose best interests might be compromised by outside interest. This would be enforceable by the regulator, but no responsible operator would wish to expose truly reluctant winners, or those whom it felt would damage its image. Bad PR is in nobody’s interests.

For their part, the media would still be obliged to follow the Press Complaints Commission’s code of practice in relation to privacy.

The National Lottery’s winners are its best advertisements. They are real, they come in various shapes and sizes, and they do delightfully human things with their money. They are not “on message”, and their smiles are clearly genuine. Camelot tries to persuade winners to step into the light. But out of the top 20 jackpot winners in National Lottery history, only eight have done so. However, there is nothing to say that they did this because they were vulnerable. It may be that they simply didn’t fancy it.

Removing the right to privacy would not require an act of parliament. It could be accomplished at the stroke of a pen. The government should do it now, while it is liberalising the gambling sector. In the tenth year of the National Lottery, that freedom would be a very welcome – and valuable – birthday present.

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Whose money is it anyway?

At the moment, we have no say whatsoever in how National Lottery money is spent.

MARTIN WAINWRIGHT hopes that might be about to change

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But it, too, has produced its share of disasters. The decision to give more than £50m to the Royal Opera House in the earliest days of the Lottery queered the pitch for smaller arts projects and fomented suspicions of a closed, “luvvie” world.

The Arts Council did not help by centralising its operations during the Lottery decade and moving big decisions away from the grass roots.

The third approach is the most promising for real change. Its workings are currently the subject of a major consultation and it is the most important debate within the Big Lottery Fund at the moment. Like the other two approaches, the distribution system is almost entirely in the hands of appointees, but they have a small number of more democratically chosen colleagues. They also work to a plan devised after an enormous, regularly updated audit of the voluntary and charitable sector, which outlaws “cherry-picking” from applicants.

The system was the brainchild of the National Lottery Charities Board (renamed the Community Fund in 2001),

Ten years of Lotterydom have been a wasted opportunity for experiments to get citizens to help run the state one of the five original distributors set up by John Major in 1995, and an extraordinary creation for a Conservative government. Although chaired by a former treasurer of the party, David Sieff, it was staffed with lively innovators. Its vast consultation with voluntary and charitable groups produced lasting support for a simple mission statement: to help those at most disadvantage. The Charities Board devised an awesome machinery that was robust enough to defend controversial grants – and the Daily Mail was soon in action against asylumseekers or gay and lesbian groups.

More importantly, it provided a firm, audit-proof platform for some nice constitutional footwork: picking committee members by the random process used to select court jurors; meetings open to the public; the targeting of deprived areas that had missed out on their fair share of Lottery funds.

The Conservative government shuddered at some of these initiatives, but honoured John Major’s crucial promise at the outset that Lottery distributors would be independent. Not so new Labour. One of the Blair government’s first moves was to create another distributor, the New Opportunities Fund, who went pell-mell into funding health and education,

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here are few things you are less likely to do than win a National Lottery jackpot, but one of them is to have any direct say in the distribution of its weekly loot to the “good causes”. The giant pot of gold is, and always has been, in the hands of appointed quangos. And these, since the accession to power of new Labour, have had a very proactive government breathing down their necks.

There have been some flashes of radical light amid a fog of alleged initiatives meant to “encourage involvement”, but in general the ten years of Lotterydom have been a wasted opportunity for experiments in getting citizens to help run the state.

This is widely regretted by reformers (and by Camelot), because Lottery funds are an unusual asset – neither public nor private and very much an afterthought for ticket-buyers whose only motive, in all but a handful of cases, is to get rich.

Dispensing the funds has offered, and could still offer, a unique chance for taking administrative risks, piloting constitutional changes, and giving the public a real voice.

Who makes the decisions at the moment? There are lots of committees and panels, but only three distinct methods of supervising how they work. The first is the unashamed “topdown” approach of giving a free hand to seasoned quango operators and experts in the various fields, because they are the people who know. This has worked efficiently for the Heritage Lottery Fund, which doles out support for everything historical – from stately homes to oral records of the 1984/5 miners’ strike.

It was disastrous, however, for the Millennium Commission, the most august of all the distributors, as the ultimate political boss of the Lottery, the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport, is automatically a member. The concept of “experts and people who know” foundered on the disaster of the Millennium Dome, a novelty based on guesswork. Many smaller projects from the Commission, which stopped getting Lottery funds in 2001 but will take until 2006 to dispose of them all, have shown the same caprice and lack of business plans.

The second approach is the tucking of the Lottery grantmaking system beneath the wing of long-standing bodies with wider remits – mostly quangoid, but with all sorts of links into the community, some flexible and quasi-official, others statutory and tied to local authorities. This applies to all arts grants, through the Arts Council, and all sports ones, through Sport England and its equivalents in Scotland and Wales. The principle differs little from the “top down” approach, but the practice has been more innovative, giving the public chinks through which to spy, or even sometimes air, their views.

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previously out of bounds as they were considered to be services that should be paid for from tax.

The two funds were paired up last year in the Big Lottery Fund, and the great issue at stake is which culture will now dominate? Or, intriguingly, can they somehow be spliced?

Tessa Jowell, the current Culture Secretary, may be ridiculed when she insists on the BLF’s independence, while at the same time announcing (in September) what the government says the body’s first three grant-making programmes should be.

But she can counter this with the fact that the people are behind her. New focus groups, local polling and public meetings held by the Lottery distributors, all say: spend the money on education please, and health.

The result, say pessimists, will be the total loss of the Lottery’s supposedly “extra” money over and above the mainstream spending that ought to come from tax. But there are optimists, too. Lord Nolan’s reforms mean that quangocrats

are drawn more widely than before – check out the membership of Lottery committees and see how the un-English practice of applying to join a quango because you’re keen and good and have something to say, rather than waiting for an old chum’s murmur in the ear, is catching on. And the random selection system has brought in a very diverse bunch who would never have thought of applying: an ex-majorette from Barnsley, a Birmingham health visitor, a York teenager at university in Sheffield, an electricity engineer from Kent.

The Commons select committee on public administration singled out these “political jurors” as an idea that should be more widely tested, citing Tom Paine on the ordinary citizen’s “mass of sense lying in a dormant state”. Radical Tom added: “The construction of government ought to be such as to bring forward, by quiet and regular operation, all that capacity.”

Maybe with the government in the saddle and its Lottery priorities popular, the next ten years will see that happen.

Do you deserve to win?

Sure – unless you’re young, unemployed, gay or a criminal. By ELLIE LEVENSON

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en years ago, I was 16. Not much into smoking and with few offers of sex, I was a bit stuck for ways of showing how grown-up I was. Then the National Lottery began. Precisely because it made me feel adult, I bought a ticket and won a tenner. I played it on and off for the next few years, won nothing and gradually lost interest.

However, if the “It could be you” slogan had come true, and I had been the one in 14 million to win the jackpot, I suspect that people would not have been hugely pleased for me. The reason is that 16-year-olds do not feature on our list of “deserving winners”, kindly constructed and maintained for us by the tabloid press. This list includes anyone young, anyone already well-off, the unemployed, anyone living in an “unusual” family situation (a gay relationship, for example) and anyone convicted of a criminal offence. “Deserving people” include the disabled, the elderly and the poor, as long as they have worked in a decent job all their lives and have a “normal” family life.

Therefore, everyone was delighted when Doris Tiff’s syndicate of 12 dinner ladies won £2,353,332 in September.

These were deserving winners because they were in low-paid jobs, and old. Even better, they had worked in a school for children with special needs. By contrast, everyone was horrified by Iorworth Hoare, who won £7m when he bought a ticket while on temporary release from an open prison where he was serving a sentence for attempted rape. Yet the very nature of the Lottery is, well, that it’s a lottery. Anyone could win, rapists or not.

Not only do we judge our winners; we also like to judge what they do with their winnings. I’m sure that, if I won a million or more, it would change me. But strangely, we

admire most of all those people who declare that it won’t change them a bit. And we applaud them when they decide to spend it not on themselves, but on their family and friends. We like this because it comforts us with the idea that if any of our family or friends won the Lottery, there’s a chance that they’d spend it on us, too, thus making the odds of us being in some way a winner that bit better.

What surprises me – although it shouldn’t, because clearly people who play the National Lottery like to gamble – is the number of people who use their winnings to head off to Las Vegas. One winner did just that with more than £20m in the bank. Presumably they didn’t need to win more money – perhaps they just wanted to lose some of it.

There is also admiration for those who give to good causes. In fact, we carry the notion of deserving winners to good causes, too. By their very nature, they are all good, but some good causes, it seems, are better than others. A BBC Online poll has been asking readers “What is your favourite good cause?” in a poll to decide which ones win a National Lottery Helping Hand Award. One respondent suggested that “Lottery tickets should have a tick box for who you want the money to go to”.

Presumably he means which good cause, though I suspect that many people would like to be able to specify the winner, too. And our favourite kind of winner, as in many things (think Eddie the Eagle), is the hapless winner. So our absolute favourites are such not because they are hugely “deserving”, but because they are ever so slightly inept – the sort who, having gone out to buy a celebratory bottle of wine after a £1.5m win, are unable to drink it because they don’t own a corkscrew.

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The garden of Eden The Lottery gives people the chance to take a risk. And, explains TIM SMIT, co-founder of the Eden Project, it can make a real difference to the whole community

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eople gamble because they hope to win.

If you don’t take risks, you’re not in the game. It has always struck me as ironic that a country that could justifiably lay claim to being a mother of invention seems to have spawned a social and institutional apparatus so resistant to change and frightened of risk.

Worse, the individuals who unwittingly act as the brake are usually open-minded and forward-thinking. They are simply stuck in a system where the penalties for failure are so Not just in a bubble: the benefits of the Eden Project are far-reaching Draconian as to make the risk not worth it. public space dominated by advertising for global brands, with The National Lottery confronts this paradox and has had a nothing to root them in their locality. What I have learned significant impact on the social landscape of Britain. There from Eden is that you must be rooted in your community, not have been many successes and remarkably few failures, a growth on it. Lottery-funded projects such as ours can make considering the breadth of schemes that have been undera huge difference; entering into long-term contracts with suptaken – cycle paths, space and science centres, village halls and pliers gives local communities the confidence to expand their greens, the National Forest, aquariums, canals, art galleries, businesses without the vulnerability associated with constant environmental parks, botanical gardens, sponsored athletes, renegotiation of terms. the purchase of works of art and historical papers and a new Eden has pioneered several initiatives that it is starting to university, to name but a few. extend beyond its own boundaries. The first is Waste Neutral, Much has been written about the Eden Project and the a system that tries to reach equilibrium between the recyclable so-called “Eden effect”, which has generated more than materials consumed on site and waste produced from it. The £500m in new revenue for Cornwall. Eden has so far welmeasuring of this is ingrained in all our working practices. comed more than five million visitors through its doors in Almost all our transactions are measured according to the three years. It has, to a degree, been responsible for a change assessed impact they will have on the social, economic and in the public’s attitude to Cornwall and is thus seen as a environmental domain. The course of action chosen is that symbol of regeneration. which meets with the least general disapproval. We want to It is also a challenge to traditional economic thinking. Had explore what it means to be a sustainable organisation, and Eden borrowed the entire £120m capital cost, it would not hope to open our working systems to public scrutiny on the have been viable, yet the returns to the wider community web so that we can continually improve our performance and are such that a high-street banker would rip your arms off others can be inspired to implement similar procedures. for the business. One of the great strengths of the Lottery The Eden Project has been incredibly fortunate to be grant system is that it insists, to a varying degree, on matched involved with people who dared to do things that they could funding being found elsewhere. This is positive in that it easily have found excuses not to. We are entering a new age proves a test of the management skill of those in charge of where people aren’t content simply to earn a living – they the projects. want it to have meaning. Half the Eden team are people who Eden has about 450 staff, making it the second-largest left highly paid jobs elsewhere to follow their hearts. private employer in Cornwall. Our sourcing policy means The British are not very good at getting past the “means to that about 90 per cent of our food and 60 per cent of our retail an end” mentality. The greatest battle our generation faces is comes from within Cornwall, with the other 40 per cent of the to make it OK to be idealistic and follow our hearts. The Lotlatter being largely accounted for by camera film and books. tery has done a great deal to spur this on. It has released an In the early years, we frustrated some of our sponsors by energy into civic projects that could never have been managed refusing to accept sponsorship from major global suppliers, by central government. Lottery projects have ownership on the grounds that this would prevent us from supporting written all over them, and hence real meaning – an amazing our own community. achievement in an age shorn of symbols.

I wince when I visit some major projects and see their

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Think yourself lucky Never mind winning the jackpot. RICHARD WISEMAN has found that true good fortune comes from within

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en years ago, I started to investigate why some people are consistently lucky while others always encounter ill fortune. I placed adverts in newspapers, asking for exceptionally lucky or unlucky people to contact me. Over the years, 400 men and women have let me put their lives and minds under the microscope. I interviewed them, asked them to keep diaries, complete questionnaires and take part in various experiments. In one early test, we examined whether lucky and unlucky people might experience different levels of success on the National Lottery. We quickly discovered that there was no link between luck and Lottery success. Why was this?

Well, the outcome of the Lottery is the result of pure chance, and it would therefore be very strange if anyone could predict whether they will consistently win or lose. So why did our participants consider themselves lucky or unlucky? Because they were talking about being lucky or unlucky in life – always being in the right or wrong place, getting more or less than their fair share of lucky breaks, and so on.

Our findings revealed that this type of luck is not a magical ability or the result of random chance. Instead, although most people have almost no insight into the real causes of their good and bad luck, their thoughts and behaviour are responsible for much of their fortune.

Take the case of chance opportunities.

Lucky people consistently encounter opportunities whereas unlucky people do not. I carried out an experiment to determine whether this was due to differences in their ability to spot such opportunities. I gave people a newspaper and asked them to look through it and tell me how many photographs were inside. I had placed a large message halfway through the paper announcing:

“Stop counting, tell the experimenter you have seen this and win £150.” The message, in 2in-high type, took up half the page. It was staring everyone in the face, but the unlucky people tended to miss it, whereas the lucky people tended to spot it. Other tests revealed that unlucky people are generally more tense and anxious than lucky people, which disrupts their ability to notice the unexpected. They go to parties intent on finding their perfect partner and so miss opportunities to make friends.

They look through newspapers determined to find a certain type of job advert

We quickly discovered there was no link between luck and Lottery success. Why? and so miss other types. Lucky people are more relaxed and open, and therefore see what is there rather than just what they are looking for.

Another important principle revolved around the way in which lucky and unlucky people dealt with the ill fortune in their lives. I asked people to imagine that they were waiting to be served in a bank. Suddenly, an armed robber enters the bank, fires a shot and the bullet hits them in the arm. Would this event be lucky or unlucky?

Unlucky people tended to say that it would be just their bad luck to be in the bank during the robbery. In contrast, lucky people often commented on how the situation could have been much worse. As one lucky participant commented, it’s lucky because you could have been shot in the head – also, you could sell your story to the newspapers and make some money. In imagining

how the bad luck they encounter could have been worse, lucky people feel better about their lives. This, in turn, helps keep their expectations for the future high and increases the likelihood of their continuing to lead a lucky life.

Towards the end of the research, I carried out some experiments to examine whether people’s luck could be enhanced by techniques designed to help them think and behave like a lucky person. For example, participants were shown how to be more open to opportunities and deal more effectively with bad luck. The results were dramatic.

After just a month, 80 per cent of people returned happier and luckier. Unlucky people had become lucky, and lucky people had become even luckier.

Take the case of Patricia, 27, who had experienced bad luck for much of her life. A few years ago, she started work as an airline cabin-crew member and quickly gained a reputation as a bad omen. One of her first flights had to make an unplanned stopover because of some abusive passengers, another was struck by lightning and a third was forced to make an emergency landing.

Patricia was also unlucky in love. But after a few weeks at luck school, her bad luck had vanished. At the end of the experiment, she declared that she felt like a completely different person. For once, everything was working out her way. Other volunteers had found partners through chance encounters and job promotions through lucky breaks.

This research revealed a new way of looking at luck and the role it plays in our lives. It demonstrated that much of the fortune we encounter is a result of our thoughts and behaviour. People are unlikely to get lucky by winning the Lottery or doing well at the casino.

However, they can increase the luck they experience in their daily lives by changing the way they think and behave.

Professor Richard Wiseman is a psychologist at the University of Hertfordshire. His The Luck Factor and Did You Spot the Gorilla?: how to see opportunities are published by Arrow Books

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Co-op and the Lottery

By GED CARTER, general manager, advertising and dividend, Co-operative Retail he Co-op is unique as a business with social values.

We believe in the ethical values of honesty, openness and social responsibility and the principle of concern for community, while at the same time optimising profits for our members.

Although somewhat younger, the National Lottery is also well established and has a unique place in society; raising money for Good Causes in a socially responsible way and pouring funds into projects in communities across the UK. As part of the Co-operative movement, Co-op stores are proud to have contributed an incredible £427,030,842 – that’s almost half a billion pounds – of more than £16bn that the National Lottery has raised for Good Causes over the past ten years.

It's money that has been good for the UK, money that has helped fund more than 180,000 Good Causes, from village halls and theatre groups to grassroots sports projects, youth clubs and local charities.

The National Lottery has been good for our business as well, which means it’s been good for our customers and the communities we serve.

I still have to remind myself occasionally of the size of the Lottery as a category; over those ten years, it’s certainly had a big impact on our bottom line. In addition to the 5 per cent that our stores earn in commission, recent research shows that Lottery shoppers spend 50 per cent more than non-Lottery shoppers, and that 67 per cent buy something else along with their Lottery ticket (Convenience Tracking Survey, Harris International). The commission and extra money the Lottery delivers helps underpin the long-term sustainability of our stores, and Camelot has worked in recent years to provide an improved level of account management service to us as a key player in the market.

But while the Lottery may be a numbers game, it’s not just about the figures; as with everything we do, it’s also about the human side, about giving back to society. The Lottery creates a buzz and a talking point in store, and we certainly see an influx of players coming into our stores when there’s a big jackpot or a Rollover. Whenever our customers pop in to play – whether it’s for a scratchcard, the odd Lucky Dip or a syndicate of regular Lotto players – we like to remind them that 28p in every pound goes to Good Causes. After all, even if they’re not one of the four million or so winners created every week, players like to know the good that the National Lottery is doing.

So we are delighted to have helped to get the National

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A proud partner: Ged Carter

Lottery back into growth; that’s good for our business and our customers – and it’s also good news for the Good Causes.

But the Co-op, like Camelot, knows that it’s not all about selling tickets at any cost. In line with our position as a responsible retailer, we have a role to make sure that we don’t sell to under-16s. As with all our ethical policies, our commitment towards age-restricted products is something that the Co-op takes very seriously.

Our staff are trained rigorously to guard against under-age play, and we work with Camelot to make sure all point-of-sale material is clearly displayed to ensure that all customers are aware that we don’t sell to under-16s. Camelot’s pioneering Operation Child initiative is designed to protect against under-age play, ensuring that staff ask players for proper identification if they look under-age.

At the Co-op, we are delighted to have a wider association with the National Lottery. The Co-op will be celebrating the first ever National Lottery Day on 6 November and saying thank you to players for helping to raise those billions of pounds in funding for Good Causes. So Happy Birthday to the National Lottery; here’s to another 10 years.

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A date to remember:

6th November 2004 The 10th Birthday of The National Lottery – marked by the first ever National Lottery Day