National Lottery Reform
Debate between John Penrose and Andrew Smith(13 years, 9 months ago)
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John Penrose
I am delighted to be able to help the right hon. Gentleman out here, and I hope to provide the reassurance that he is seeking.
We will be phasing in the share changes. Currently, they start from a 16.66% share, and we will raise them to 20% each over the course of the next two years. The right hon. Gentleman will have noticed that in two years the Olympic top slice of lottery funding will come to an end. Therefore, although Big’s share will fall from 50% today to 40% in two years’ time, it will be a smaller slice of a much larger pie, because the Olympic funds will then be part of the whole. As a result, if he does the calculations, he should see a steady increase in cash terms for Big as well as for the other good causes. That is certainly shown by all the figures that I have seen. That outcome is important, which is why we have phased the changes to match the end of the Olympic funding.
Mr Andrew Smith (Oxford East) (Lab)
Going back to the question asked by my hon. Friend the Member for Newcastle-under-Lyme (Paul Farrelly), if arts bodies suffer a loss of grant as a consequence of the cuts by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, will they be able to apply to the lottery to make good that loss?
John Penrose
The short answer to the right hon. Gentleman is that anyone is free to apply, but the real question is whether that application is successful. The test that I expect any lottery grant-giving operation would apply is whether the application matches its terms and conditions and fits the limitations that it can impose on funding. I expect that a fund would look very carefully at a straight one-for-one comparison, because it would be very concerned about breaching additionality. I know that lottery fund grant distributors are alive to that issue.
I go back to the response that I gave to my hon. Friend the Member for Solihull (Lorely Burt) a little while ago—because such operations are at arm’s length, it is rather difficult for any Minister to predict or suggest too strongly what they will do. The decision, after all, is theirs, but I imagine that they would look at such issues tremendously closely.