The National Lottery will, no doubt, be well pleased with yesterday's annual results. Buoyed by a record jackpot of £7.5 million last November, the company recorded an income last year of £308 million - the tenth consecutive year of impressive growth.
The Lottery, which has been criticised for its. dominance in the marketplace, seemed anxious to highlight that last year's level of growth was the lowest. recorded and it pointed to increasing competition. from the bookmakers and from the British National Lottery. But none of this should disguise the reality that the Lottery has grown beyond all expectation. When it was established almost a decade ago, the government of the day anticipated annual income of between £10 and £40 million.
And there is every prospect of continued development; the new 5-4-3-2-1 game will, no doubt, help to recoup a sizeable slice of lost income from the bookmakers and the Lottery is already talking excitedly about new advanced technology which will soon be employed to develop more games and build more income.
But it is also the case that the Lottery has become a victim of its own success. It may like to trumpet the millions of pounds that it has raised for beneficiaries, but the public, from what one may gauge, seems remarkably ungrateful. This is scarcely surprising; Lottery funds have come to be regarded by successive governments as little more than another form of income, with the Administration enjoying full discretion to allocate funds. The practice of individual politicians announcing how they have "secured " Lottery funding for various amenities in their constituencies, may also have undermined public goodwill.
The Lottery, thanks to the political expediency of successive governments, has also come to be associated with broken promises. The original guarantees - that the Lottery would be used to fund new areas of spending; that it would greatly benefit sports and community organisations and that it would operate in an open and transparent way - have all been abandoned. One study estimated that only 7 per cent of Lottery funding went to genuinely new projects; some 90 per cent of current Lottery money has simply replaced programmes which the government already funded in 1986. The reality, a decade after its inception, is that the Lottery has made little tangible difference to national or public life. There are still sports clubs in the heart of the drug infested inner city which have no more than rudimentary facilities; there is still chronic under funding of sport, cultural and community efforts and, perhaps symbolically, there is still no 50 metre swimming pool.
It is to be hoped that the current independent review will help ensure that the Lottery finally delivers' on its original promise. Most citizens in this State - certainly those in the PAYE sector - are already shouldering a heavy tax burden. They have a right to expect the same kind of sporting and cultural infrastructure that other EU citizens take for granted. Few would object if the National Lottery helped to achieve this objective.