Orders of the Day — National Lottery Bill [Lords]

Part of the debate – in the House of Commons at 8:37 pm on 7 April 1998.

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Photo of Christopher Fraser Christopher Fraser Conservative, Mid Dorset and North Poole 8:37, 7 April 1998

I shall confine my comments to the Bill rather than giving a Cook's tour of my extra-curricular activities, as the hon. Member for Eastwood (Mr. Murphy) did. I should tell him, however, that I have just won a bet on the length of his speech. If he would like to exercise his talents in other ways, I strongly recommend him to join the all-party racing and bloodstock group. I would welcome him willingly, considering the tips that he has given us in the debate.

No one questions the success of the national lottery. More than 94 per cent. of the adult population have played it. More people regularly take part in the lottery than voted in the general election. Labour Members who have said otherwise and have commented on the general election should be reminded of that; life did not begin on 1 May.

Not only has the lottery become a national institution, but it has a major impact on the quality of life in Britain by raising significant sums for the five original good causes, strengthening community ties by improved access to cultural and leisure activities, and promoting economic regeneration. According to a recent report by the Royal Bank of Scotland, the lottery has created and safeguarded 13,000 jobs. Of course, it boosts retail trade, too.

At the end of 1997, 22 national lottery awards had been made to projects in my constituency. Since then, a major award in excess of £85,000 has been made to Dorset Wildlife Trust to acquire 100 acres of heathland at Upton, which will be managed as a nature reserve. Smaller grants made to charities and to heritage, sports and arts budgets have benefited from the £4.9 billion that has been raised for good causes.

I cannot say whether any of the 544 new millionaires created since the lottery began live in my constituency, but I can say that thousands of my constituents enjoy a flutter, and an occasional win. They embrace the principle that the national lottery was set up to restore our heritage and to promote projects that will become a source of national pride.

The Government are happy to pay tribute to the great success of the national lottery. I suppose that it would be churlish to say that the lottery is yet another Conservative achievement which they are now happy to embrace. Now, however, they propose to tamper with it and undermine it, as they have with other national institutions. To them, making things new seems as important as making things work.

Yet again, the initiative is Treasury led. Proceeds from the lottery will be diverted to Treasury so-called good causes, in addition to the money that it already receives from ticket sales, because the Government do not have the political will to raise taxes.

The Bill will turn the national lottery into a state lottery. Mainstream public spending projects will now be funded in that way, despite the Prime Minister's affirmation in the White Paper, "The People's Lottery". That has been referred to many times, and my right hon. Friend the Member for Horsham (Mr. Maude) has already quoted from it, so I shall not do so again.

Thus, important principles of the national lottery are overturned at a stroke. Despite the Secretary of State's earlier comments, I am sceptical of his assurances about the additionality principle. The principle that lottery funds should be distributed by bodies operating independently of Government is in jeopardy. A proportion of the local initiatives that strengthen communities will be replaced.

That is another example of the Government's determination to centralise power, under the cloak of the description, "the people's". As has been said, that phrase has been used in many other areas throughout the world, especially in the eastern European communist regimes, so it is interesting to hear Labour Ministers and their official spokesmen using that phrase in the context of the present Government.

It is no good the Government's claiming that the New Opportunities Fund initiatives are optional or additional to the initiatives currently funded from the public purse. Despite what the Secretary of State said, I believe that, as my hon. Friends have already said, they fall within the normal Government spending responsibilities of health, education and the environment—all areas in which the Labour party, which now forms the Government, made manifesto pledges before the election.

Spending programmes are constantly evolving, but, even applying the most creative accounting, the Government cannot rightly transfer to the national lottery the cost of such evolution. If the only changes being introduced are new social aspects of spending programmes, such as the training of teachers and librarians in information technology, the Government are not doing their job properly if they fund them from the lottery. I had intended to say that that was the thin end of the wedge, but I agree with my right hon. Friend the Member for Cities of London and Westminster (Mr. Brooke), who has already said that it is the thick end of the wedge.

I question some specific aspects of the Bill. For example, what will the healthy living centres be? I have written down several ideas for what they might be, but we must ask how they will compete with the services already offered by the national health service. Do they represent another way in which to reduce the expenditure of taxpayers' money on GP services, pharmacists' charges and preventive medicine? I look forward to hearing the Minister's response later. A network of such centres is promised—a strategic plan, no doubt, for the Secretary of State promises to acquire the power to exercise greater control over how lottery money is spent, not only on its pet projects, but geographically.

I admit that the south-west has done well, and my area has participated in that; 10.3 per cent. of awards, excluding countrywide awards, have come the south-west's way. That is less than the proportion for London, of course. None the less, the awards made in the south-west represent a tribute to the people who have devoted time, effort and imagination to the submission of applications for funds.

I have first-hand experience of that. I was a district councillor before becoming a Member of Parliament, and I applied for a lottery grant for the improvement of a council estate in my ward that had been neglected for 55 years while it had had a Labour councillor. I am pleased to say that in the first year after I was elected, we applied for a grant. With great success, we achieved what we set out to do on the second occasion, with support from local people who cared about where they lived. That experience is relevant to the Bill.

If, as I suspect, the Secretary of State wishes to tackle what some in the House see as a regional imbalance in the distribution of lottery money, he is in danger of throwing out the baby with the bath water and getting rid of the diversity inherent in the voluntary and community initiatives that come forward.

The national lottery was set up to stimulate community activity by creating opportunities for local people to form groups to apply for grants and find matching funding. That opportunity has been seized and turned to best advantage throughout the country. It is interesting to note that most of the grants go to London, which temporarily has a majority of Labour-held seats. Any Labour Member who says that he or she does not see the benefits of the lottery is misinformed.

Now, it seems, the Government believe that local initiatives can be imposed from the centre. The lottery sports fund has committed £680 million to 2,500 capital projects, resulting in enormous benefits. More than 90 per cent. of all the schemes approved have been for community-level projects, most of which have cost less than £100,000. That is laudable.

The key to ensuring equitable distribution has been the adoption of two policies—the priority areas initiative, through which increased support is given to the most deprived areas of greatest social need, and the school community sport initiative, through which increased support is given to school projects that also provide guaranteed access for the local community out of school hours.

Despite what the Secretary of State said, independent monitoring of the first 320 completed projects has shown that for sport, investment in bricks and mortar is really investment in people. For example, participation by the under-18s has tripled, as has participation by women, and participation by people with disabilities has doubled. Schools are opening up for the community out of traditional hours, playing time has been extended and coaching opportunities have been increased.

In my constituency, the community in Alderney is looking forward to the opening of a splendid new sports centre at the Martin Kemp Welch school, which incorporates a competition-sized swimming pool, a trampoline facility and a centre of excellence for gymnastics. That magnificent development at a school making great strides to improve its image within the community that it serves—I am pleased to say that I had a preview of the facilities when I visited the school last month—has been built with a grant from the national lottery equating to £2.5 million. It will be open to the community out of school hours and it will provide a much-needed centre for local people, young, old and disabled alike.

That lottery application, submitted by the borough of Poole before the establishment of the school community sport initiative, will benefit an area much in need of such facilities. In other parts of the country, by using deprivation indices as a measure of assessment, the Sports Council has been able to ensure that the areas of most need achieve lottery support. Surely that is more important than pure geography, in the form of a map covered in equidistant coloured pins, which seems to be what is proposed.

By permitting the distributing bodies to solicit bids, and requiring them to produce strategic plans, the Government not only increase their own power, but discourage the initiative of local people, which has been the backbone of the lottery's success in supporting grassroots sport at community level.

Demand for grants from the lottery sport fund exceeds supply by a ratio of 4:1. The financial instructions to the fund stipulate how much information the distributors have to collect, the partnership funding that applicants have to provide, and how the distributing bodies are to monitor lottery awards.

That approach has worked well, but now the Secretary of State wants to move the goalposts. He seeks to solicit applications, although there is no shortage of applications. Awards will be made on a whim and a fancy, irrespective of whether there is community support for a project.

The present model of awards is transparent and, I believe, free from accusations of political gerrymandering. It would be interesting to hear how the Minister—neither he nor any of his ministerial colleagues is present in the Chamber—intends that positive characteristic to continue.

The national lottery has exceeded expectations. The good causes expected to benefit, as they have, from public enthusiasm and support, and to receive their fair share of the £1 billion excess that is projected over the next seven years of the lottery's operation; not least, they expected the Government to keep their election promise that the New Opportunities Fund would be introduced to replace the millennium fund.

Now, we are presented with a sixth good cause, as well as the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts, so everybody's relative share will fall. Good causes will lose out. The Secretary of State tried to talk his way out of that broken promise by suggesting that they will get at least as much as they would have done had the national lottery been less successful.

The White Paper said:

although the existing good causes will be receiving a smaller share of lottery revenue, the success of the lottery means that they can still plan on receiving the same amount as envisaged when the lottery was set up. The House should dwell on this point: in essence, the Secretary of State is saying to the good causes that they will get less in the future, but that they should try to forget that, because the Government expect them to get the same amount as was predicted when the lottery was still a paper concept. He is telling them, "Close your eyes, forget the experience of the most successful lottery in the world and be grateful for getting less."

Some people use words to illuminate their message; others to emasculate it. I shall leave it to the House to judge into which category Ministers—none is present—have fallen tonight. Were the matter not so serious, it would be laughable. The Heritage Lottery Fund, in particular, fears for its ability to undertake larger projects in future, when it could be considered the very essence of the lottery's existence to restore our heritage and create projects of which Britain will be proud.

Somehow, the Government manage to blame the people for their reforms, suggesting that responses to the consultation exercise represent the views of a cross-section of society or of those who play each week. Many hon. Members have talked about that, and, when pushed, Government Members have not been able to put their finger on the figures. In fact, only 92 individuals took the trouble to reply. The support of the 496 lobby groups, local authorities and schools, all of which stand to gain from the Bill's proposals, apparently gives the Government a mandate to meddle and to blunder.

The Secretary of State said that he sees one of his roles as "restoring public confidence" in the national lottery—"the people's lottery—"but the numbers playing and the amount awarded to good causes have never been greater. All the evidence points to the fact that the people are happy with their lottery.

The Secretary of State is playing politics with the lottery. He will be seen as the great plunderer of the 20th century—dare I say a Robin Hood in reverse, taking from the people to supplement and pay for the Government? If he gets his way, and the Bill is enacted, he may find that his abiding contribution is to be remembered as the Minister who undermined confidence in the most successful lottery in the world.