Camelot takes punt on Poundland sales

Lottery operator in tickets trial as revenue booms

NATIONAL Lottery operator Camelot is trialling selling tickets for its games in selected Poundland stores.

Chief executive Nigel Railton says Camelot is also looking at convenience operators as it wants to make sure its games are as widely available as possible.

Camelot hopes the Poundland trial will be as successful as the ones in Aldi and Iceland, both of which are now rolling out the Lottery’s games across their estates.

“We’re going where the customers are,” Railton said.

Under his watch, the National Lottery has reversed years of falling sales. Last week it revealed record sales of £8.4billion for the 12 months to the end of March, up 5.9 per cent, its fourth consecutive year of revenue growth since Railton revamped the business.

He added that its sales are still growing: “We started the current year with great momentum and it’s continuing.”

More than 37 million people played a

National Lottery game last year, which helped it give a record £1.9billion to good causes. Without that money, a number of charities and voluntary organisations would have gone under due to the economic impact of the pandemic.

Last year Camelot provided £1.2billion of emergency funding to the pandemic response – the biggest outside of central Government – which Railton said rallied the public and retailers around the National Lottery. Providing Covid-19 relief funds helped it overcome a dip in sales during the first lockdown, when people and some retailers questioned whether Lottery tickets were essential. “It could have been very different if we hadn’t intervened early on [to fund the pandemic response],” Railton said. “Just look at the French lottery, it went down 10 per cent.”

Camelot has invested substantially in updating its operations and the Lottery but future investment could be affected by the Gambling Commission, Railton said. The National Lottery has been run by Camelot since its launch in November 1994 and later this year, the regulator will announce who will run it from 2023.

Aside from Camelot, bidders for the next 10-year year licence include Italian operator Sisal, Czech gaming group Sazka and former Daily Express and Sunday Express owner Richard Desmond, who owns the Health Lottery.

Aside from the £1.9billion given by the National Lottery for good causes last year, the Government received more than £1billion in taxes on ticket sales and more than £110million in commission from retailers, taking the total generated for society to more than £3.1billion.