After Thoughts by Jane Taylor

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Lottery gongs
Enclosed with this issue of Lottery Monitor is a covering letter and nomination form for our new Awards for Excellence in lottery funding. Apart from my banging on endlessly in this column about how other people need to promote the lottery’s achievements more effectively, we believe this is a practical contribution that Lottery Monitor can make to that same goal. We are going to present the awards at this year’s annual conference in early July, after a prestigious and independent panel has selected the winners. For our initiative to succeed we really need the help of our readers: you are the people who have the hands-on involvement with and knowledge of lottery-funded projects, and you are the people most likely to know which projects are worthy not just of celebration but also of honouring as something really special. So please take a few minutes to make some nominations and send them back to us. And if you have colleagues who might want to send in their own suggestions, copy the form so they can pitch in, too. 

Cash mountain
No doubt I have by now bored my readers to death with my forensic examination of the National Lottery Distribution Fund. I certainly don’t want to hear any more about it myself for a while. But I feel I should record a couple of opinions I have formed during my research. Firstly, as I always suspected, there is no single body or practice to be blamed for the lottery cash mountain: like everything else to do with lottery funding the picture is broad and complicated. But it bothers me that several of the smaller boards have significant levels of uncommitted funds and don’t seem to think this is a problem. Are we to draw the conclusion that certain lottery bodies in Scotland and Northern Ireland simply do not need the inflated proportions of funding that they now get? I also think that recipients of large capital and strategic awards, including local authorities, should bear the main responsibility for ensuring their take-up of grant is efficient – and should sign up to deadlines to ensure this.

Finally I have my doubts about whether an annual reporting requirement on the boards is a strong enough stick to shift the lottery cash mountain. Granted, there are many other optional measures, but I do think quarterly exposure to public accountability at least over the next couple of years until the raft of good practice measures are entrenched, might be more appropriate via a DCMS pull-together of the latest state of each board’s balances and commitments. 

One that got away…
Warning: what follows is unsubstantiated rumour. I can’t verify it because it has been airbrushed from history. But I understand that the Community Fund asked a question in its January public opinion survey (see p1), the results of which do not appear in the published data. Respondents were invited to agree or disagree with a carefully worded neutral statement that may have read something like this: “Camelot directors are more interested in lining their own pockets than in running the lottery in the national interest.” And the numbers who agreed (or strongly agreed) may have been 81%. Ouch.