Jowell announces broad Lottery review

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Distribution boards and Camelot alike will be under the spotlight over the coming months. Jane Taylor reports

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Tessa Jowell, Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport, opened the way to a wide-ranging review of the National Lottery in a parliamentary debate on 1 March. As well as rean-nouncing the forthcoming review of future Lottery structure and licensing, she opened up the prospect of a ‘pro-gramme of reform’ for the funding side of the Lottery. Subjects included the £3.5bn unspent cash in the distribution fund; evaluation of projects to demonstrate value for money and improvements to people’s lives; a redefinition of the principle of ‘additionality’; a role for the Lottery as ‘community venture capital’ funder; more joined-up working among distributors; how to ensure local equity in the distribution of funds; and permitting the Community Fund to finance endowments.

The minister indicated that consultation on the future of the Lottery would kick off before the summer parliamentary recess. Consultation on the programme of funding reforms may or may not be part of that same review, but the timing is likely to be similar. 

The House of Commons debate took place the morning after the announcement of the final list of Fair Share areas. There has been frantic activity between the DCMS and the Community Fund in recent weeks to try and find a rigorous and defensible formula that addressed the government’s deprivation targeting requirements. The Community Fund’s new chief executive, Richard Buxton, was said to have become increasingly anxious that his board could end up double- or triple-funding certain localities unless a more sophisticated formula was devised (see pp3-5 for a full explanation of the formula). This concern reflects a heightened awareness of how much variation there is between the different boards in their funding of disadvantaged areas, a point that Tessa Jowell referred to in her speech, saying: ‘I shall ask distributors other than the Community Fund

Fair share areas

and the New Opportunities Fund to look long and hard at those areas that have received less of their funding in the past.’ The Community Fund acknowledges that this leaves deprived rural areas out in the cold, and it has therefore tacked on to Fair Share a targeted ‘rural initiative’, to be drawn up in partnership with the Countryside Agency. CF has allocated £10m from the new Fair Share total of £168.75m for this programme.

A spokesperson for the Countryside Agency said: ‘The list is disappointing because the number of rural areas has gone down from nine to four. But that is countered by the Community Fund’s very welcome news of undertaking an initiative with us.’ Among MPs attending the parliamentary debate, perhaps the dominant issue raised was concern about the role and purpose of NOF, and in particular whether it was violating the Lottery principle of additionality. The Secretary of State, however, made a clear statement of her commitment to protect the distinctiveness of Lottery funding from Exchequer interference.

Extracts from Tessa Jowell’s speech