Disputed grant and poor sales spark row

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Distributor and lottery operator are blaming each other for too much bad news. Jane Taylor reports

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Tessa Jowell, the Culture Secretary, warned Camelot and the Community Fund to cease their ‘public bickering’ as the row over funding asylum-seekers made media headlines again at the end of September. Jowell, speaking from the Labour conference in Blackpool on Radio 4’s World at One, said: ‘I have limited means to stop them bickering in public, but it is bad for the lottery. The lottery was designed, quite rightly in my view, to be politician-proof. But we need an outbreak of common sense.’

Alongside the public putdown the Community Fund was told privately by government officials to stop talking to the media about the case of the National Coalition of Anti-Deportation Campaigns, the group whose £336,000 grant is frozen, pending the result of an internal CF inquiry into the propriety of the award. Although an announcement was expected by the end of September, the final decision has to be made by the Strategic Grants committee which should meet by late October. 

The public spat arose after Camelot’s chief executive Dianne Thompson told the Sunday Times she believed her company had suffered a loss in sales because of the NCADC award and attendant publicity. Thompson had, some two weeks earlier, contacted the editor-in-chief of the Daily Mail, Paul Dacre, to ask him to tone down his newspaper’s battering of the Community Fund because she was concerned about the negative effect it was having.

Camelot subsequently quantified the negative sales effect as more than £500,000 a week based on a particularly dismal performance in late August. In a statement it said that the adverse publicity had ‘caused a dramatic reverse in our growth trend’. The CF responded by accusing Camelot of trying to make it a scapegoat for the lottery operator’s continuing inability to stem the decline in Lotto sales. Camelot says it is compiling a dossier of evidence about the negative impact of the NCADC publicity, which it intends to present to the DCMS and the distributors. It is likely to consist of comparative sales analysis plus feedback from retailers and anecdotal evidence of ‘hundreds’ of hostile calls and letters from the public about the grant. Refuting the Sunday Times’s suggestion that Camelot was angling to take over some responsibility for lottery distribution, Camelot’s spokesman Andrew Jones said: ‘We have no ambition to have any say whatsoever in where the money is distributed’, although this does not rule out the possibility of introducing some hi-tech public polling device as part of people’s ticket purchase – an idea which Camelot is thought to find attractive. At its meeting on 24 September the CF board discussed the NCADC issue, and decided on a change to its funding criteria for the future, to bring them more into line with the guidance used by the Charity Commission to decide whether campaigning and political activities are acceptable or not. The relevant guidance is a Charity Commission document known as ‘CC9’, but the CF’s director of policy Gerald Oppenheim said the fund will have to draft its own version, to take account of the non-charitable voluntary organisations within the CF’s ambit. This would, he thought, take several months to bring about.