Clause 1 - Constitution
National Lottery Bill
11:30 am
Hugo Swire (Shadow Minister (the Arts), The Family & Culture, Media & Sport; East Devon, Conservative)
A canter, says the Minister, great aficionado of the turf that he is.
Clause 1 and amendments Nos. 18 to 20 deal with the make-up of the National Lottery Commission. Amendment No. 18 would insert the words
“but not more than seven”
after “members”. Amendment No. 19 would remove the Secretary of State’s ability to appoint the commission’s chairman. Amendment No. 20 would remove her ability to appoint the chief executive or any other employee of the commission. Most such organisations maintain a split between commission members and staff, and the amendment would maintain the status quo. Taken together, the amendments would leave the commission’s structure as it presently is.
We are not convinced of the need for more than seven commissioners. Again, we debated that on earlier clauses. In any case, the commissioners are presumably paid out of lottery funds, although we have established that we do not know how much.
We also do not believe that the commissioners’ current practice of selecting their own chairman needs to be changed. In an earlier exchange, the Minister suggested that the arrangement had not worked well and that it had not been a happy one. Perhaps he will tell us exactly why he thinks that that is the case. I suspect that he will again say that he is merely doing what he has been asked to do; this time by members of the National Lottery Commission. Although I understand that the practice of electing a chairman every 12 months might have its drawbacks, I am not convinced that that justifies the new powers in the clause. In any case, the issue is worth debating.
If the timing is the problem, why not allow the members of the commission to elect their own chairman for two, three or four years? I do not see why the power has yet again to be vested in the Secretary of State, which, as the Minister will have discovered by now, makes me uneasy. Can he point to any members of the commission who are saying, “Please take this democratic power away from us. We are completely incapable of selecting our own chairman”? It is interesting that schedule 2A to the 1993 Act, as amended in the document that the Minister has so kindly provided, shows just how the Secretary of State proposes to extend her powers in this regard.
Why is the issue of who selects the chairman so important? The commission has wide-ranging powers over the lottery licence and holds the key, in effect, to a multimillion pound commercial operation. A decision on a new licence is just around the corner, and we shall come to it in 2009; well, we in the Committee are not coming to it in 2009, although at this rate we might do. We are coming to it later in our proceedings. Given that that is about to happen, we should adopt the arm’s-length principle and keep the selection of the chairman as far out of ministerial hands as possible. The issue should be managed by the impartial commissioners. It is also possible that the Minister might not be in place in 2009, at which point someone else may have different ideas about it.
The amendments pursue the theme that we have followed throughout the Bill whereby, at every turn, we seek to resist the move towards a concentration of power with the Secretary of State. Where better to resist that move than in the composition of the commission, who should chair it and for how long. I hope that the Minister considers the amendments reasonable. I look forward to his response.