After Thoughts by Jane Taylor

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Would, should, will, won’t
Just how solid is ‘additionality’, that precious concept that supposedly keeps Lottery funding pure and protected from the evil grasp of avaricious politicians? About as solid as quicksilver, is the answer. Despite warm words from the Secretary of State in her Southwark speech, additional-ity will be under scrutiny within the forthcoming Lottery review, not least because NOF would like it to be (see Stephen Dunmore, p6), but perhaps more importantly because of what distributors such as the Arts Council of Wales are up to. Richie Turner’s article (p5) demonstrates beautifully how malleable – and therefore pointless – the concept is. ACW has decided, for the best, most sensible of purposes, in effect to merge its Lottery and grant-in-aid funding streams. Technically it ought to find this impossible, because additionality says that Lottery cash must only fund activities above and beyond those that would be funded by the Exchequer. But if you allow just a tiny lapse in grammatical standards, by substituting present tenses for conditionals, you can escape the bind. Thus, the ACW says, Lottery will fund anything that is not Exchequer funded. As long as we don’t double-fund our beneficiaries by giving them grant-in-aid and Lottery cash for the same thing, we can regard the pots interchangeably. They have a strong point. If a fabulous project is threatened with closure because of the withdrawal of state, European, local authority, etc, funding, what sense does it make to refuse Lottery support simply because the previous funding came from the public purse? On that logic the Lottery is condemned to an eternal role of creator of glorious things which it cannot ever sustain, while it denies salvation to other glorious things just because they were created elsewhere.

What the ACW has done is to codify and make explicit the approach that has been increasingly common among all those distributors who have grant-in-aid as well as Lottery funds to manage. Good for it, I say, for recognising that its priorities are art, people and financial efficiency rather than the maintaining of some dodgy political line in the sand. 

Ratner relaunch
I spent my weekend recently defending Camelot’s chief executive, Dianne Thompson, against the media eruption of shock-horror that Ms Thompson had ‘Ratnered’ her company by suggesting the public does understand the meaning of a one in 14 million chance. In part I was spurred on by my rage at the lazy, capricious pack mentality of the press. I had been at not one but two previous Camelot press events in which Dianne Thompson had made the same comment, and it had passed unreported by anyone, including the BBC, ITN and the Daily Express, all of which then decided it was a top story. I am, however, forced on to the defensive. Not least because the aftermath of that media hysteria – which occurred in Camelot’s crucial relaunch month – produced dismal Lottery sales figures. I’m not joining the doomsayers, because I do think there’s a lot more fun and mileage to be had from the Lottery yet, but I am more nervous than I was a few weeks ago, and looking forward slightly anxiously to Dianne Thompson’s address to our own annual conference on 3 July.

Ratner reborn
There was a wonderful moment of chutzpah in the week that Camelot was being done over by the media. Up popped Gerald Ratner on Radio 4’s Today pro-gramme, happy to talk about his own bad press – and to announce that he was setting up a jewellery business. PR to die for!