After Thoughts by Jane Taylor

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It’s been a bad month for the Lottery:

Camelot sales figures down again, two big official reports criticising the handling of grants by Sport England and the Arts Council of Wales, and the depressing news that inequalities in distribution are still rife. Even though the evidence of our reader survey suggests that insiders’ confidence in the distributors is growing, that matters little if public confidence in the whole process is plummeting. I am reluctant to join the doomsayers who see slow decline as the inevitable future for the Lottery, so I am crossing my fingers for a massive public kick-start for the new licence from Camelot in the new year. But no one should be in any doubt about the negative cumulative effect of damaging publicity such as the Wembley fiasco or the collapse of the Centre for Visual Arts. We know that ‘Lottery funding’, in the public mind, usually conjours up associations such as ‘Royal Opera House’, ‘Churchill papers’ and (cringe) ‘Dome’. Now people have a couple more monumental flops to add to their mental impression of what good the Lottery does.

A second negative trend has become clear this month, too, in discussion around these various news stories: the increasing tendency for everyone to talk about Lottery funding as ‘public money’. Government ministers do it all the time, but they are not alone: you will catch TV reporters, estimable chairmen of Select Committees on Culture, etc, and even Lottery distributors using the same phrase. One mention on a radio debate this month provoked the frustrated outburst from Tony Banks MP, ‘It’s not PUBLIC money – it’s the PUBLIC’s money.’ You get the difference. Camelot’s spokespeople like to say ‘players’ money’, which is accurate but not very sexy. And ‘people’s money’ sounds unfortunately new-Labourish. But the difficulty of finding a neat catch-phrase to distinguish Lottery funds from mainstream tax spend underlines the enormous PR problem of maintaining any meaningful difference in the public mind.

There is a significant school of thought that says, who cares? There’s no reason to believe that the public gives a damn whether their local hospital’s new angiog-raphy machine or school fruit come from the Lottery or from tax coffers, just as long as it’s there. I don’t buy that argument (though I have no evidence to argue the opposite). More importantly, I don’t want to believe that argument. But I do believe that the lower and more dismal the profile of Lottery funding in the public imagination, the more likely that the ‘don’t care’ proposition will become a reality.

Camelot, the distributors and retailers are getting together to talk joined-up promotion opportunities. Here’s my proposal: I want the nation to hold an annual National Lottery day. I want it to be a condition of all Lottery grants that their grant-holders make a contribution to the National Lottery day, either by having a public open day; or by appearing in a local festival programme featuring their work, or by being part of a local exhibition / fair featuring a multitude of project information or by helping run a local arts and sports festival or by any other imaginative, participatory method they can dream up. It should be a day of discovery, fun, education, a massive public celebration of the thousands of ways that the Lottery and the work of all its beneficiaries have enriched our lives. The Lottery needs a truly spectacular vote of public confidence if it is to avoid that fate of slow and anonymous decline. A National Lottery Day could do it.

Oh, and happy festivities to all our readers. We reappear in February, so that’ll be a rather premature Happy New Year, too.