Culture secretary Tessa Jowell reflects on the first 10 years of the lottery and finds it’s changed the country for good

The National Lottery is a success story like no other. Since it began it has raised over £16 billion for good causes, funding over 160,000 projects up and down the country. It has changed the face of Britain forever.

But to maintain this success the lottery needed to change. We needed to get grants out more quickly and easily. We needed to make a clearer connection between playing the lottery and investment in the good causes. We needed to widen public support for the lottery and to make it clearer where the money was going. And we needed to ask people what their priorities were and give local communities more of a say in how their money is spent.

This was not change for change’s sake. It was needed to keep the public engaged with the lottery, to keep them playing, to keep them trusting in its power for good, and to keep giving them a reason to spend their marginal income on their lottery ticket.

The shorthand for this blueprint was: giving the lottery back to the people. Lottery money is not government money. It’s not distributors’ money. It belongs to the people of Britain who play the lottery. It is venture capital for their communities. They need to feel a sense of ownership of the money and see the evidence that is spent on their behalf and in their interest.

This means more than just defending the principle of additionality, important though that is. It means people feeling that their concerns are taken seriously by the custodians of lottery money. It means people having real power to shape decisions and to influence outcomes.
Too often people feel excluded from decisions ostensibly taken on their behalf. They see a political class talking to itself in a language that seems designed to exclude. Too often, people encounter public services which they feel are offered on a take-it-or-leave-it basis.

So right across government we are responding to those concerns, raising standards, offering choice and involving people rather than excluding them. And the lottery is so special, so directly connected with the millions of lottery players who play every week, that these principles of engagement and responsiveness are even more important.

So that’s why we’ve begun this process. First of all we launched the new lottery distributor, the Big Lottery Fund, on June 1. Already, led by Sir Clive Booth, it is at work developing a new approach: community based; knowledgeable about other initiatives and local circumstances; targeting disadvantage; transforming places and lives; engaging and helping applicants.

The fund will be a single point of contact for all distributors and a consistent way of handling applications and complaints; in presenting the big picture about what lottery grants are delivering; promoting excellence in the funding of major capital projects; pioneering new and innovative approaches to programme delivery. It will lead, too, on simplifying and streamlining lottery applications.

Above all, they will make real and permanent the changes to involve public, players and communities. The Big Lottery Fund will give people a real chance to get involved with the lottery funding process and to say how they’d like to be involved in the future.

The second is that as well as new ways of consulting people, the Big Lottery Fund is also going to pilot ways of getting people to make decisions on individual grants, starting off next year by piloting the us of citizen’s panels to take decisions on small grants: local people making decisions about how money is spent in their area.

And they’re planning to use television to not only raise awareness and generate interest in getting involved in smaller lottery projects, but also to get people involved in deciding on some of the bigger lottery grants, including a public vote on transformational projects.

We also need to let people know what their lottery money has achieved, with an emphasis on common branding of lottery projects and funding. The National Lottery Promotions Unit, set up last October, has already started on this. Common branding is key. By November, 10,000 blue plaques will be in place right across the UK, using the crossed fingers logo to mark projects that have been funded by the lottery. And in future every lottery funded project will be identified in this way.

I said last year that I wanted to see a greater, more efficient service for applicants and improved processes which help distributors to operate more efficiently – seeing lottery money going further.

So how have distributors risen to that challenge? Well, already distributors have agreed common standards of service and a common complaints procedure, and they are identifying further measures to get grants out more quickly and easily, cut down on bureaucracy and increase efficiency and effectiveness.

Awards for All has also been a huge success and a model of efficient, responsive grant making. That is why I said in the decision document last year that Awards for All England would pilot a scheme for smaller grants of up to £500. The scheme will be quick and easy to access, funds will be delivered at a local level and, most important of all, local people will be involved in making decisions about where the money goes.

The Awards for All scheme marks a new era in lottery funding. It shows the lottery still responding to the people’s priorities, but reaching out further – both in terms of funding and in terms of public involvement.

And that’s increasingly the way that the lottery will develop. So that in the future we will see a more inclusive lottery with greater public trust and greater public engagement. 
Ten years on, the lottery has changed the face of Britain forever. That’s not an empty boast, it’s a fact. In an era where lottery bashing is a popular sport in some parts of the media, I think we need to say that more often.

This year sees the lottery celebrate its 10th birthday. From the winter wonderland at the Eden project in the South West, to bonfires throughout the Highlands and Islands, to “Big Lunches” throughout the UK – lottery projects the length and breadth of the country will be proudly celebrating what the lottery has helped them to achieve.

The National Lottery and English Heritage are opening the doors of lottery funded projects for free – the National Trust is opening specially that weekend. We’ve got an ice rink in the Forum in Norwich and ice hockey in Belfast, fireworks at Magna and the Deep in the North, preview tours of the fantastic new Millennium Centre in Cardiff: the list – believe me – is a very long one.

But it’s not just the big projects either. Community centres and voluntary organisations all over the UK will be opening their doors to celebrate the lottery’s contribution to their local communities.  A key part of the celebrations will be the National Lottery Helping Hand Awards. The public will get to see some of the best projects across the country that have been funded by the lottery, and will choose their favourites. 

These celebrations, both on November 6 and in the months leading up to it, are our chance to show together just how successful the lottery has been.

Rt Hon Tessa Jowell is Labour MP for Dulwich and West Norwood, and secretary of state for culture, media and sport

Click here for more articles in this series.