After Thoughts by Jane Taylor

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The people’s phone poll
Among several stimulating conversations at the Lottery Monitor annual conference, I was treated to one wacky but brilliant idea for promoting greater public awareness and involvement in Lottery good causes. Because the originator of the idea is a senior executive within the Lottery funding industry who has to maintain a semblance of gravitas, I was unable to persuade them to air the idea under their own name. So I’ve decided to take charge of it myself and here it is: Allocate, say, 10% of all Lottery funding cash to mad, irresponsible projects. These would bypass distribution body scrutiny altogether. Applicants would write a single-page proposal for their idea, which would go into a hat. A celebrity, or Gigi, or a previous Lottery jackpot winner or whoever, would be asked to pick out of the hat five projects each week. Each of the short-listed projects would then have a 30-second video made of their idea, for airing the following week on the Lottery show, at which point the public would vote (a la Big Brother) for the winner.

The faint of heart might prefer to impose a ceiling on the maximum award via this route, but there is a powerful argument for not fixing any limit – you can’t really expect to create amazing entrepreneurial breakthroughs on a £5k grant.

Before you write off this proposition as a whimsical absurdity, check this. I heard on Radio 4 the other day an interview with a representative of English Heritage, talking about a forthcoming television programme co-produced with Endemol (makers of Big Brother), in which the public is to be asked to vote a winner from among a selection of listed buildings, to receive heritage funding for renovation. All of a sudden my friend’s wacky Lottery idea looks almost copycat. Which means its time has most certainly come. 

Camelot chameleon
The keynote speech from Dianne Thompson, Camelot’s chief executive, at our annual conference this month managed to make me feel both happy and depressed. I am greatly in favour of the efforts that Camelot is putting into raising the desultory public profile of Lottery funded projects. But I was disheartened at the shift in emphasis in the marketing message that the Lottery operator seems to have made in recent weeks. For much of last year and in the build-up to the relaunch this year, Camelot seemed to take every opportunity to assert that it was determined to buck the global trend of ‘Lottery fatigue’. But post-relaunch –which has admittedly been a rough ride for the operator – there is a new emphasis on the inevitability of global decline in the big Lotto game, which was very much in evidence in Ms Thompson’s address to our conference. So now there certainly is daylight between the view of the Culture Secretary, Tessa Jowell, who has firmly stated in her Licensing Review that she does not believe Lottery fatigue to be inevitable, and the latest view from the operator, which seems to assert that it is. 

Hope to see you soon, Neil
If any diligent reader had followed my urging and marked July 9 2002 in their diary a year ago, they would have been left standing in London’s Regent’s Park, awaiting a meeting that never happened. The occasion was to have been the annual open board meeting of the New Opportunities Fund, an experience that both I and Neil White, Surrey CC’s NOF officer, found fascinating when we attended last year.

NOF didn’t tell me why they had not organised the event again this July, but they say they will hold an open board later in the year. Watch this space.