Government unveils reform package

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Two white papers launched at Lottery Monitor’s annual conference herald changes in distribution and future licensing. Jane Taylor reports

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A new super-distributor and a big increase in public involvement in lottery funding are the main planks of the government’s white paper on lottery reform issued on 3 July, after a year’s consultation. A second white paper, dealing with future licensing arrangements, confirmed the government’s intention to try and break up the operator’s existing monopoly and enable several companies to run different bits of the National Lottery.

Since news of a proposed merger between the New Opportunities Fund and the Community Fund became public in January, it had been expected that this administrative shake-up would be the mainstay of the distribution white paper. But while the merger is the big item requiring legislative change, there is a raft of proposed changes that should push lottery funding into a new phase.

The role given to the new distributor is powerfully pre-eminent among lottery funders, and is clearly intended to extend beyond this, with a new power to handle non-lottery funds. The new body is charged with making all the bureaucratic improvements that politicians and applicants have so long called for and all the boards so conspicuously failed to deliver to date. It will be expected to reduce application turn-around times, organise pre-application support, set up an independent complaints body, stan-dardise application procedures, offer a general funding advice service, coordinate cross-distributor funding and manage the portal inquiry phone line and website.

As proposed in the joint NOF/CF ‘vision document’, the white paper confirms that the new distributor will become a major ‘community’ funder, with two main grants strands: Open Grants and National Programmes. But it also takes on a substantial role as funder of ‘transformational projects’, thus keeping alive the role of the lottery as a sponsor of grand-scale innovative public infrastructure. The white paper’s definition of transformational projects is broad, extending beyond building works to regeneration and community renewal. The new distributor will also take on any outstanding duties of the Millennium Commission, and any remaining assets, when the MC winds up in 2006.

The second big theme of the white paper is, as Tessa Jowell, the Culture Secretary, likes to say, ‘re-engaging’ the public with lottery funding. The white paper confirms the setting-up of the Joint Promotion Unit to increase public awareness of existing projects, but also puts forward a range of exhortations and headline options for involving more people in deciding both the strategic direction of lottery funding and who should get specific grants.