National Lottery Bill

Part of the debate – in the House of Lords at 6:04 pm on 6 February 2006.

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Photo of Lord Brooke of Sutton Mandeville Lord Brooke of Sutton Mandeville Conservative 6:04, 6 February 2006

My Lords, I thank the Minister, not just for his lucid introduction of the Bill, but for the courtesy with which he sent an imaginative package of material to those of us in your Lordships' House whom he surmised might take an interest in the Bill. The revision of the 1993 Act that he sent was headed:

"This is a version of how the National Lottery Act 1993 will read as amended by the National Lottery Bill"— he then went into heavy type, underlined—

"after being considered in Standing Committee A in the House of Commons, November 2005 and Report/Third Reading on 19 January 2006".

This showed remarkable confidence in the ability of the Commons government Whips to ensure the rejection of any amendments—a confidence that, given other events last week, turned out to be illusory.

I declare a non-financial—perhaps an emotional—interest from my prior ministerial association with the National Lottery etc. Act 1993 and an equally non-financial interest, the Daily Mail notwithstanding, from my involvement in the Joint Committee on Pre-legislative Scrutiny on what is now the Gambling Act 2005. It is also a pleasure to be reunited with my noble friend Lord Astor, who was a fellow collaborator on the 1993 Bill in its passage through your Lordships' House.

The gestation of the Bill over the past three years has shown some infirmity of purpose. If the Secretary of State was not of the same gender as Lady Macbeth, the latter's famous words to her husband might have been quoted towards her. Of course I realise that, where she has retreated, she might claim that that was because this Government are a listening government rather than that the original ideas were ill thought out. On balance, however, it looks as though it was six of one and half a dozen of the other.

I realise how these mistakes occur. I was a member of an administration where a No. 10 edict wanted 35 per cent of board places on NDPBs to be held by women by a certain date without recognising that, unless we were going back to male summary execution, an insufficient number of vacancies would occur during the specified period for the accomplishment to be achieved.

Similarly, the Secretary of State's determination to achieve cutting off half the balances in no time at all ignored the fact that the process by its very nature is prone to create new balances every year. Fortunately, the National Audit Office has longer experience of these numerate considerations and advised that running down balances takes real time. I am not even entirely easy about the Government's intentions on the destination of interest on balances. A Rolls-Royce engine takes longer to devise, test and build than the components that make it up, so inevitably it has different financial imperatives. Sending someone to see a war grave is an admirable initiative, which the Big Lottery Fund has recently consummated, but in all respects it is swifter than building a cathedral.

For this very reason, I welcome the extension of the licence period. Any organisation that wins a licence twice will be judged by what it said in its application. Camelot has achieved a remarkable feat by reversing the decline in ticket sales, but product development takes time. I admire what it has done with EuroMillions, in relation to which so remarkable an event occurred over the weekend. The very thought of negotiating such a consortium of nine nations daunts me—and I have four years' experience behind me as British Minister on the EU budget council.

I am also glad that the Government are at last making an honest woman—or, indeed, couple—of the Big Lottery Fund, although in the e-mail wedding announcement someone might have imaginatively recognised that "biglottery" is, at a rapid glance, close to both "bigotry" and "bigamy".

On additionality, which will occupy us, nothing can ever wipe from my screen the memory that, when the New Opportunities Fund allocated cancer equipment to individual hospitals, I heard about my constituency allocations from the Secretary of State for Health before I heard from the New Opportunities Fund.

I look forward to hearing the Minister explain in Committee the claim on the DCMS website during the Committee stage of this Bill in the Commons that:

"Government is investing £2 billion of public and National Lottery money in sport by 2006".

I shall be interested, too, to hear in Committee how he squares that with the statement made by Mr Caborn, the Minister in charge of the Bill in Committee in the Commons, who said:

"We as a Government are strongly committed to ensuring that lottery grants are additional, so new clause 1 is not necessary".—[Official Report, Commons Standing Committee A, 3/11/2005; col. 241.]

The new clause had been tabled by the Liberal Democrat opposition. It may not come as a surprise to your Lordships' House that the subject of new Clause 1 required the Secretary of State to issue guidance on just such additionality.

The Big Lottery Fund also has a mild identity crisis between living in sin and the conjugal bed. The official website, which ends up with an abbreviation for aspidistra—I do not know who owns it—tells us that the Big Lottery Fund had spent £13.5 million in grants on 322 projects by the 16th of last month. However, the literature that the Big Lottery Fund has bestowed on us in briefing for the debate does not indicate how this amount is separated from the much larger sums that the same Big Lottery Fund, presumably as an amalgam of the individual prior partners, also claims to have spent. The noble Lord, Lord Rooker, once agreed with me that legislating for regional assemblies' referendums when regional assemblies already exist was Orwellian. In the context of the Big Lottery Fund, it is also confusing.

Moreover, I challenge the Minister—this is a genuine challenge—to take a "Mastermind" examination on the Big Lottery Fund document England and UK programmes 2006–2009, which carries opaqueness to an art form, all against a quote from the Minister in charge of the Bill, Mr Caborn, on the DeHavilland report broadcast on the morrow of Commons Third Reading, which was:

"I think the transparency that we've now put into distribution is one that should not just satisfy Parliament but also the general public as well".

The Minister and I can conduct this "Mastermind" cross-examination in the margins of Committee.

Although Mr Caborn is sure that we do not need to place in the Bill the Big Lottery Fund's commitment that 60 to 70 per cent of its funds will go to voluntary and community organisations, there are ambiguities in what the Government and the fund have collectively said in this area that we shall need to examine in Committee.

There is also an enchanting coincidental irony that one piece of polling by the Big Lottery Fund says that nine out of 10 lottery players believe it is important that the general public are involved in deciding where lottery funding should go. Camelot's analogous research reveals that players are not motivated by the fact that there are good causes, but 91 per cent of the players play the game essentially to win. Of course, I can square that circle, but it does not suggest that opinion polling is a sensible way to defend your choice of individual destinations for the good-causes proceeds if you are a distributor. This is of more than a little importance now that ITV is entering the destination process—the Minister will know what I am talking about. It is not clear whether ITV voters are players, even if the percentage of proceeds on which they will be voting is, at the moment, de minimis. Even if it is de minimis, we shall also have to watch media intrusion, whether by ITV or the Daily Mail, if the public are to be convinced that their actions are meaningful.

I was mildly shocked to hear the other day, quite a long time after many of us voted on 30 conservationist projects on the programme called "Restoration"—our telephone calls were supposed to be paying for the conservation of the winner—that the restoration of the winner has not yet properly started. But in this regard, the Bill is to be welcomed in enlarging the opportunities for the National Lottery Promotion Unit to educate us all.

All in all, I agree with the Minister that the lottery is a good thing—although I realise perhaps I should not say it—and we should all rejoice at Camelot's international reputation and in the energy of its recovery in raising money for good causes. I look forward to Committee and I shall not have to force myself to simulate interest—an engaging phrase, which a typographical error in the final sentence of the Big Lottery Fund's presumably un-proofread briefing on this Second Reading creates by substituting "simulation" for "stimulation" in the text, an error that the Big Lottery Fund's critics might say unintentionally gives the game away.