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National Lotteries Bill

That is a possibility, and my hon. Friend makes his case strongly. My case is slightly different. Given that it is still the shared priority of the major parties that health and education should get the lion’s share of increased taxpayers’ resources, and given the large sums involved, it is difficult to see how a bigger additional contribution can be made by lottery funding. It would be difficult to identify the areas that would be genuinely additional and that everybody would agree the state should not provide. The state is the monopoly provider, the provider of last resort and the general provider of health and education services to most of our constituents and, as such, it has the duty to ensure that whatever is new or worthwhile in those areas is properly paid for out of taxation. My concern is with the traditional areas for the lottery, which will be squeezed by these proposals. We can see that under clause 7 half of the amount will go to the new purposes—health, education and environment, of which the first two are likely to be the dominant ones—and the worry is that arts, heritage, sports and charities will be squeezed. Why were they identified as suitable areas for lottery funding—attracting cross-party agreement—in 1992-93? It was because the state was not dominant in those areas. The state is not the main provider of arts, heritage, charity or sport in our country. There are huge amounts of private money in sports such as soccer, mostly from television companies, huge amounts of voluntary donations to charities, and arts and heritage attract a great deal of private money from rich companies and rich individuals and the many of our constituents who visit them and pay fees for the privilege of doing so. The amounts provided by the state to those areas were not huge and the state did not dominate funding, so it was possible to identify smaller community projects or larger tasks that needed additional money, to which the lottery could make a real difference. We all have examples of the lottery’s success in achieving just that. The worry is that if we allow Ministers to get away with providing money from the lottery to health and education without proper rules on additionality, there will be backsliding, so that matters that we agree should properly be paid for in the normal way by the taxpayer take money and detract from the amount available for the other good causes for which the lottery has become famous and which it should fund in the future. I face a conundrum when asked to approve the amendments. My hon. Friend the Member for Cities of London and Westminster says that they are the best that we can do and I am often swayed by him, but it would give me and many others for whom I speak greater comfort if the Minister could give us a better insight into the sort of prescriptions that the Secretary of State will produce if she is entrusted with these powers. It would be helpful if we had before us a clear definition of additionality that made sense and could provide a way to police the operation of these clauses. The Minister may think that the Big Lottery Fund has the common touch, although people might consider the name to be a tad vulgar for something so well intentioned. It is certainly ambitious and presumptuous, but I hope that people realise that they need to keep on buying tickets if it is to stay big. As my hon. Friend the Member for Castle Point (Bob Spink) said, many people will want reassurance that the lottery will not become a cheap trick for a Government who have run out of money. They have spent a very great deal on the core purposes of health and education without achieving all that they wanted. The proper purposes of the lottery were defined on a cross-party basis when it started, but those purposes may be put under pressure and begin to wither. We must not get into the sort of vicious circle that my hon. Friend described, with people’s lack of enthusiasm causing contributions to fall. Moreover, I should be reluctant to get into a pincer movement, with health and education taking more and more, as my hon. Friend the Member for Cities of London and Westminster implied could happen. All too often, the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence makes judgments about remedies that doctors and patients in my area think could be valuable, and then says that they will not be available on the NHS. If the lottery were to begin making up for NICE’s meanness, it could be very expensive. It might be popular, but it would not be in the spirit of additionality, and the Government have given no reassurance on the matter. At the risk of damaging the wonderful spirit of consensus evident in the debate, I urge the Government to think more clearly about additionality, and to offer more reassurance in that regard. The Bill is another example of Henry VIII legislation, and a lot remains to happen after it has gone through the House.