Part of the debate – in the House of Commons at 8:53 pm on 7 April 1998.
I am happy to follow the hon. Member for Mid-Dorset and North Poole (Mr. Fraser), because it gives me the chance to take on some of the big mythologies that Opposition Members have peddled tonight. They suggest that redistributing lottery money to the people and getting it down to smaller organisations that do not have the necessary resources at present to back up their applications by matching funding will benefit only the Government and not the people.
I do not understand how Conservative Members can continually peddle that logic; perhaps they hope that if they say it often enough, it will stick. The people know that when we redistribute the lottery money in accordance with the Bill, we shall allow access to people who were denied it before.
The hon. Member for Mid-Dorset and North Poole made great play about our heritage crumbling away. For 18 years, his party was responsible for our heritage and allowed it to crumble away. The previous Government used the lottery to do things that they were unable to do through their own policies because they had made such a mess of the economy.
The right hon. Member for Huntingdon (Mr. Major) spoke well. He spoke about the five original causes that were listed and that he thought were correct, but the Secretary of State informed us that, before the general election, the right hon. Gentleman himself talked about the possibility of using lottery money to bring teachers back into schools to teach sports. That was clearly an intention to move.
Why do we have to get into this ridiculous posturing, when we want simply to move sensibly from where we are to where we want to be? The three matters that are outlined to be added to the lottery's five functions—access, excellence and education—should be applauded. There is nothing wrong with trying to move in the right direction.
The hon. Member for Mid-Dorset and North Poole suggests that we can give people absolutely more than they thought they would get, simply because there is more money in the coffers, but that it is somehow wrong to have another cause. When any funding or fundraising agency creates more money, we should not simply keep going on in the same way, giving more to the original ideas, when there are some new ideas to which the money can be applied.
If we are to get an estimated £10 billion up until the time when Camelot goes— or its licence is renewed—we should use it in a different way, and that is what we intend to do. The Bill and the White Paper set that out. The hon. Member for Mid-Dorset and North Poole should have read the document: it tells us what healthy living centres are. They are new and important, and were not provided for in expenditure by the previous Government.