Clause 14 - Functions
National Lottery Bill
9:30 am
Andrew Turner (Shadow Minister (Charities), (Assisted By Shadow Law Officers); Isle of Wight, Conservative)
My hon. Friend could do that, but why bother? We would have 12 good men and true collecting £5,000 a year—I concede that that is not a huge sum to pay people who give time to public bodies—so why bother to change them if the Secretary of State has power over them? He would change them only if he did not have time to issue directions. I accept that not all Secretaries of State have sufficient time to issue all the directions they wish to issue if they have to go through the civil service machine.
Let us abandon my flight of fancy about one extreme that a Secretary of State could go to under the new section and deal with subsection (2)(a), which states that the Secretary of State may
“specify persons to whom the Fund may or may not make grants”.
The Secretary of State could specify any number of organisations for no better reason than that he does not like the colour of some trustee’s eyes.
The Secretary of State may
“specify purposes”—
any range of purposes whatever—
“for which the Fund may or may not make grants or loans”.
I am not sure whether that is subject to previous clauses, but I take it that they will be read together. The Secretary of State can say that no money whatever will be given to support asylum seekers, the breeding of guinea pigs or sailing clubs, or football clubs because they are too competitive or too uncompetitive. He could decide on the basis of reasons that any member of this Committee or Member of the House other than the Secretary of State would believe are completely unreasonable, but if he believed them reasonable and the courts under judicial review believed them reasonable, he may do it.
A direction may
“relate to the process used to determine what payments to make”.
In other words, the Secretary of State can lay down the means by which the availability of grants will be advertised, the newspapers they may be advertised in, the shape and size of the pages of the form with which one applies for a grant and the language or languages in which those forms must be printed.