After Thoughts by Jane Taylor

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The pace of change in the lottery has been speeding up since the beginning of this year, when news of the merger between NOF and CF became public. But I do not recall a month in which there were so many fast-moving policy stories, including the inevitable summer rumours of ministerial reshuffles. It is therefore serendipity that Lottery Monitor’s annual conference is just a couple of weeks away: it is going to be an essential forum for updates and raising questions on a whole range of issues.

Merging or just good friends?
The cliché about something being ‘more than the sum of its parts’ is a mantra heard from the Secretary of State and from NOF executives every time they mention merger with the Community Fund. The omens are not good, though. Fair Share has turned out to be, if anything, less than the sum of its parts, as this notionally ‘joint scheme’ seems to be operating with a complete absence of combined clout from the two bodies. I gather the two boards could not even agree a joint press announcement to tell the world that the Community Fund had given its blessing to the merger. And that this had something to do with the Community Fund’s collective state of denial that a merger is happening. So the board’s official press statement danced elegantly around the issue, managing not to utter the term ‘merger’ at all. And, as we report on page 3, there are differences of view between the two bodies about what an ‘administrative’ merger (prior to legislation) means – a disagreement that carries a clear hint of less-than-enthusiastic cooperation by the Community Fund. For a distributor whose only other option for its future would be to slash its regional structure, this seems like a dodgy approach. Because there are worse things in life than merger. Such as takeover.

Fair play?
CF isn’t alone in playing word games this month. Watch out for some very flexible definitions of the ‘sports budget’, especially from the government. As a fed-up Sport England insider pointed out to me recently, the government boasts about £2bn of investment going into sport, but Sport England itself only gets about 15% of that amount to play with. The nonsporting body NOF gets rather more… Yet when I asked the DCMS whether the £340m contribution which the ‘sports budget’ is expected to contribute to the Olympics includes NOF, the answer was a firm ‘no’. Of course, if NOF ends up bailing-out Sport England’s cash crisis, I suppose the reality will be an indirect ‘yes’.

Bouquets and brickbats
Just for the record: Tessa Jowell, Culture Secretary, confirmed her appreciation that lottery funding is different from government funding when she chided the opposition spokesman John Whittingdale during the debate on the London Olympics bid last month. Her words: ‘There is a difference between public money and the public’s money. The public’s money is lottery money, which will come from people living all over the country, inspired by the prospect of the Olympic dream.’ Brickbats for Business in the Community, which has taken £1.8m of NOF lottery funds as an award partner to run Northern Ireland’s Transforming Waste programme. If you manage to find the information on BITC’s horrible web-site (seven layers down), you’ll be none the wiser by the end of the badly written project description about where the money has come from. This representation of a lottery scheme is among the worst I’ve ever seen.