After Thoughts by Jane Taylor

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Mysterious mountain
I need help. I have decided I finally need to get to the bottom of the lottery media story that has been bugging me ever since I became editor of Lottery Monitor. The story is the lottery cash mountain: £3.5bn that seems to hang around endlessly in the distribution fund (NLDF), giving the public the impression that the lottery boards are stockpiling cash while war veterans and village halls waste away.

I do understand the £3.5bn mountain, up to a point. Most of it is earmarked funds, waiting for projects to draw down their agreed allocations. I know that this wasn’t always so: for the first few years of the lottery the distribution boards were simply very slow at making decisions on applications, so while they dithered (and some were worse than others) the mountain grew. I know the mountain has got bigger than it was when Chris Smith, as Culture Secretary, first began complaining about it. I also know it has stayed the same size for the past six months, ever since Tessa Jowell reached agreement with the distributors about halving it over the next two years. I don’t know why no progress at all has been made on reducing it since April, and presumably the Secretary of State was wondering the same thing at her summit meeting with the boards in early December. So here’s my problem. If most of the NLDF mountain is committed funds, it suggests that the bottleneck in the system is the length of time it takes to get money out to projects once their applications have been approved. I have occasionally come across instances like this – ‘yes, we did get a lottery award, but actually by the time the money arrived six months after it was due, we’d had to persuade another of our backers to loan the money interest-free otherwise the whole project would have collapsed.’ But I have to say, they are rare. By contrast there is a consistent, unceasing level of complaint about the length of time it takes to turn around applications, documented through personal conversations, our regional and national conferences and our annual reader survey, not to mention the DCMS postbag. Yet the slowness of pre-approval processes does not explain the composition or size of the lottery mountain.

Can anyone provide a credible explanation? I am going to take this up with the boards and will report in my next issue, but for the moment I remain perplexed and would welcome any thoughts – or evidence – you may have about how the mountain causes problems further down the line. 

Talking of …
…war veterans, I was open-mouthed when I heard the rumours that the Community Fund was planning to set up a programme for war veterans, in the aftermath of the NCADC / Daily Mail / Simon-Weston-at-Tory-Party-Conference row. Despite the spin, the CF tells me this is not exactly what they’re thinking of. They have invited Simon Weston to present a case for funding and are waiting for him to respond. They point out that there are real illustrations of need among ex-servicemen (a high incidence of home-lessness, for instance) which would fit within existing CF funding priorities. But these do not include paying for care homes for vets. I’ll be interested to hear how this one develops.

Signing off
An eventful lottery year is almost over and Lottery Monitor takes a rest over the holiday period. Our next issue reaches you early February, so may I be the first to wish all our readers a happy new year, and on the way may you have fun, parties, and a few well-earned lie-ins.