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National Lotteries Bill

My hon. Friend the Member for Cities of London and Westminster (Mr. Field) was characteristically generous and kind to the Minister. I understand the background. Many colleagues have been involved in long and extensive debates here and in another place, and I am pleased that the Government have made some movement in the amendments in the direction that we wish them to follow. Given the spirit of consensus that appears to pervade parts of the Chamber this afternoon, it would be churlish to deny that. I therefore welcome the fact that some of the language of the National Lottery etc, Act 1993, is repeated in the amendment in lieu to take account of some of our worries. However, not all our worries are tackled. Once again, we are in a position that we occupy all too often with the Government—that of considering sketchy and general measures when the things that matter will emerge in orders and subsequent prescriptions on expenditure, which are not laid before the House or included in the statute. It is therefore a pity that the Minister has not been forthcoming about what the Government have in mind by way of proper guidance to guarantee that any health and education expenditure can be genuinely additional. More importantly, how can it be guaranteed that such spending will not crowd out the other expenditure in the 50 per cent. category that has a proper claim on the lottery as originally defined? I well remember the debates about the 1993 legislation. The then Government were attentive, as they should have been, to the Opposition’s views. The then Opposition were determined that none of the money should find its way into core elements of public spending, such as health and education, because they believed that that constituted a cop-out by the Government of the day, that the contributions would be small compared with the large sums of money spent through main programmes and that the lottery should be steered away from any such proposal. I am sure that the Opposition welcomed the fact that the Government went along with that—although they were not too generous about the matter—and ensured that the right guarantees were built into lottery legislation so that the lottery could concentrate on the arts, heritage, sport and charity and not get involved in small amounts of funding, relative to the large amount of state funding that went directly to health and education. That is the nub of the argument this afternoon—what is the problem with including health and education? There are two main problems. First, state spending on health and education is already massive, so the lottery contribution would be small in comparison. There might be a temptation to increase the lottery contribution more and more to try to increase its significance when compared with the large amounts that come directly from taxpayers’ money. Secondly, health and education are dominated by monopoly state provision involving large sums of money. It has been common party policy between the Conservatives and Labour in the past 20 years to make health and education the two utmost priorities for increases in spending. Although Labour has spent much of the past few years trying to deny that, anybody who looks at the figures will see that in the 1980s and 1990s Conservative Governments regularly increased health and education spending by more than the rise in prices and often by more than the rise in wages, and wanted to make substantial real increases in that spending. When the new Government came to power they carried on with that policy and, in the past three years, we have had an even bigger leap in health and education spending, with which we have not disagreed. We are interested to see how that works out, because it has been a shared priority across the Floor of the House that health and education should be the dominant areas that attract extra money from the taxpayer.