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National Lotteries Bill

The Bill has taken a little time to reach this point, but as today’s debate will show, it has come a long way. My Bill manager, Valerie Curtis—whom the hon. Member for Bath (Mr. Foster) has met on a number of occasions—has now gone off on her honeymoon, which was booked for after the Bill was expected to receive Royal Assent. She is now swanning around South America, and I am sure that the whole House—particularly the hon. Member for Bath—will send her best wishes. The Lords amendments deal with the relationship between Government and the Big Lottery Fund, and the need for all lottery distributors to report annually on the way in which they have interpreted the principle of additionality. Lords amendments Nos. 1 and 2 seek to remove the Secretary of State’s power to prescribe expenditure in relation to the new Big Lottery Fund good cause. We have discussed this very fully on several occasions, both here and in another place. For reasons that we have already explained at length, we believe that the powers set out in clause 7 are necessary and serve an important purpose, given the exceptionally wide scope and large size of the good cause that the Big Lottery Fund covers. Without the power to prescribe expenditure, the Big Lottery Fund would be given 50 per cent. of all the lottery good cause money to spend on anything that is charitable or connected with health, education or the environment without any further recourse to Parliament. We do not believe that that makes sense. The large new spending area of health, education and the environment that the Government created in 1998 has proved popular and successful. The new Big Lottery Fund good cause brings those areas together with the area of charitable expenditure distributed by the Community Fund, allowing an enormous range of projects to be encompassed. That is a good thing, and one of the main reasons why we wanted to bring the Community Fund and the New Opportunities Fund together. However, it does create a very different kind of good cause from the existing arts, sport and heritage good causes. Arts, sport and heritage are much narrower areas, and the existing legislation narrows things further by prescribing sums to be distributed by different distributors. That has the effect not only of limiting the definition of who can spend the money, but of restricting what it can be spent on. Parliament took the view in 1993 that such arrangements were necessary to ensure the effective distribution of Lottery money. The powers that we propose in the Bill will have a similar effect, and we believe that they are necessary now as they were in 1993.