Reckon you’ve created something awesome this year? Then make sure you get your entry in for this year’s National Lottery Awards. The deadline is 27 April and there is even a designated Best Arts Project category.
Of course there is a catch. To be eligible your project must have been completed with funding assistance from the National Lottery.
Since its inception in 1994 revenues raised from ticket sales for The National Lottery have been distributed to artists and arts organisations in England, Northern Ireland, and Wales by the respective Arts Councils. In Scotland, Lottery funds are distributed to the arts by the Scottish Arts Council and Scottish Screen.
According to a 2003 White Paper by the Scottish Executive, more than £1 billion of Lottery money has been spent on over 15,000 projects in Scotland.
In 2005, conductor and Lottery campaigner Denis Vaughan stated that a total of over £17 billion had been raised through the National Lottery.
Arts Council England says out of that total more than £2 billion has been invested in the arts. In terms of percentages, around 4.5 percent of total Lottery revenue is distributed to the arts in England and Wales, with around 8 percent for Scotland.
The reason for this generosity is that the arts has been identified as one of the ‘good causes’ worthy of extra funding. Approximatley 28 percent of revenue raised by the Lottery goes to ‘good causes’.
What constitutes a good cause? In short, whatever Government Ministers think should be a ‘good cause.’ The ‘good causes’ that have been identified are the arts, sport, charities, and national heritage. In 1993 The Millennium was designated a fifth ‘good cause’ and was superceded in 1998 by the addition of a sixth, the Olympics.
The problem is that the amount of Lottery funding put into these six areas is arbitrary. That is, there is no legislative commitment to allocate a specified percentage of Lottery funds to the arts or any of the other ‘good causes.’
While this allows for flexibility it also makes it very hard for the beneficiaries of Lottery funding, from distributing bodies all the way to individual artists who apply for funding, to be able to plan effectively because nobody can be sure how much funding will be available.
Vaughan warned back in 2005 the danger of Ministers “granting themselves the powers to decide how the Lottery money should be spent.” Despite the fact that Vaughan was instrumental in setting up The National Lottery his warnings were not heeded by the powers that be.
Sadly, Vaughan’s predictions have come true and are most apparent in the funding fiasco that has developed in relation to the Olympics.
We are getting used to headlines bemoaning the fact that Ministers have seen fit to repeatedly raid Lottery coffers to fund the 2012 Olympics. Ironically, funds diverted to the Olympics harbingers cutbacks for all the Lottery ‘good causes’ including funding for sport.
However, it is the arts that appears to have lost out the most. Arts Council England chief executive Peter Hewitt is adamant there will be negative effects in both the immediate and long term.
Even as the funding is being cut from under it, Arts Council England recently inaugurated an online ‘debate’ about how funding is distributed in England.
Although the responses don’t constitute a statistically accurate analysis of opinion, some of the comments are genuinely thought provoking.
One of the key questions that politicians often shy away from was posed by ‘Kate Lockhart’ who asked: “What is public funding? Is it money from the tax payer or from the National Lottery?”
As Nigel Reynolds, Arts correspondent for The Telegraph, quoted veteran broadcaster Joan Bakewell recently:
“She said Lottery funding had been a ‘golden egg’ for the arts and added: ‘Today it’s starting to look a bit tarnished.’”
