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National Lottery Bill

My Lords, I am grateful to the Minister for his explanation. He listened to the concerns that we raised throughout the passage ofthe Bill in this House, and those concerns were largely addressed when the Bill went back to another place. That was extremely important, because we were concerned that the Big Lottery Fund, which, after all, is going to hand out 50 per cent of all the proceeds for distribution, was not going to operate on the same basis as the other distributing bodies. The Secretary of State’s power was greater than it was in relation to the other bodies and we felt that it should be the same. The Minister has made those changes. More important, he has given us an assurance in writing that there is no possibility that the Secretary of State will be able to issue a direction under subsection (1) of new Section 36E to specify where lottery money is to be given. That is important because concerns have been expressed that, in the past, the principles of additionality have been broken by the distributing bodies. We had some clear examples of that as we went through the Bill, and the Minister's explanation has helped to assure us that it will not happen again. That is given greater strength by the amendments that the Minister acceptedat Third Reading, whereby under the Bill the distributing bodies will have to produce a report on additionality. We welcome the Government's amendments and we thank the Government in this instance for being a listening Government. It does not happen very often but we must be very grateful when it does.