The Lottery League Tables 1995 to 2001

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To impose order and meaning on the pile of statistical detail about 100,000 awards from 15 diverse awarding bodies to the value of £10.3bn over seven years feels like a saga the proportions of battling with Grendel – or if Lord of the Rings is more your thing, a Balrog. Each year the fast developing world of Lottery awards throws up new complexities and inconsistencies. The overriding purpose of this set of tables is for use at local level, so the most painful judgements are always those to do with inclusion or exclusion of awards, especially very large ones, that might distort the true level of Lottery benefit going to a locality. Thus we weed the awards over £1m carefully, leaving in nearly all the big capital schemes but taking out projects where we are confident there is no specific local benefit. A typical example would be a national organisation granted money for an ‘intangible’ initiative (information campaign, research etc). This year, however, we have also been forced to omit, for instance, NOF awards made at county LEA level, where education and district authorities are different. We hope to find a way of apportioning these blocks of money next time, as they clearly do have local benefit. 

League tables by region:

Eastern
East Midlands
London
North East
North West
South East
South West
West Midlands
Yorkshire and Humberside
Northern Ireland
Scotland
Wales

One feature of the data that can be confusing is that boards are constantly updating previous years’ awards in line with the way projects develop (or don’t). Totals related to capital projects, for instance, often change, and if a grant is only partially taken up – or not at all – the figures eventually get adjusted. 

Largely because of the exclusions, and because we made great efforts to bring the data bang up to date this time, some authorities will find more dramatic swings in their rankings than they might have found before. 

Here are the rules of engagement for determining district authority figures (but note that summary tables 2 and 3 are based on gross totals):

  • UK-wide, overseas, and multi-region awards are excluded

  • Film Council, Scottish Screen and Arts Council film production awards are excluded unless very specifically local

  • Nesta is excluded

  • The Dome and Wembley stadium are excluded

  • All identifiable programmes involving awards to individuals (rather than groups) are excluded

  • Other awards that cannot be sensibly allocated to a single district or unitaryauthority are excluded

All population figures are sourced from the latest available official data, mid 2000.

Table 1 shows the regional value per head of awards 1995-2001, with an index for comparison against the UK averages. Table 2 shows the gross totals for numbers of awards, total award value and average award value over the seven years. Table 3 breaks down the number of awards made each year under £1m into three bands according to value. Finally, thanks are due to the DCMS for use of their data for analysis, to several valiant officials in distribution boards who responded to urgent calls about data queries, and to Maughin Campbell and Dominic Jacquesson for their meticulous attention to crunching detail.