Trips to the corner shop help Lottery hit record sales

Launch of Set for Life revives flagging interest with £600m given to support Covid relief effort

THE National Lottery will announce record sales figures on Tuesday, marking a revival of the game that appeared to be on its last legs just four years ago.

After being dropped from the Saturday night BBC schedule in 2016, when the ticket price controversially doubled to £2, its 25th anniversary year will mark the best annual sales in its history. New games such as Set For Life, where the jackpot prize is £10,000 a month for 30 years, have helped to attract new customers.

However, Sir Hugh Robertson, Camelot’s first independent chairman, insists that a renewed emphasis on good causes has made the difference.

Since its launch in 1994, the National Lottery has raised £41billion for community projects, the arts, heritage and sport, where it is credited with helping Team GB to win 65 medals at London 2012 and 67 in Rio four years later.

When it announced that it was donating £600 million to the coronavirus relief effort last month, £20,000 of tickets a minute were sold in the runup to the first draw.

Although the latest year-end results only include the first week of the coronavirus lockdown, people flocking to their local convenience stores rather than solely relying on supermarkets has also sparked a recent uptick.

Sir Hugh, a former minister under David Cameron and also chairman of the British Olympic Association, is hoping that the global pandemic realigns the public’s priorities.

The one-time MP said he hoped “one positive thing that comes out of this is a renewed attention on what really matters in society”.

The former Army major, who served in Northern Ireland and the first Gulf War, said: “I hope there is a renewed focus on service, and rather less on the celebrity culture that’s slightly taken this country over. Wouldn’t it be nice if the answer, after this, is not ‘I want to be famous’ but ‘I want to be a nurse’.”

Of course, Sir Hugh is under no illusion that people do play the lottery “to win big”, admitting the introduction of Euromillions in 2004 put players off the less lucrative Lotto. But he added:

“Record sales figures help that but returns to good causes is the metric that really matters to me.”

While it has funded huge projects such as the new V&A museum in Dundee, the figure Sir Hugh relishes is that 70 per cent of lottery grants are for £10,000 or under. “There’s a huge legacy of cricket nets, football changing rooms and village halls,” he says.

Camelot is expected to bid again when the lottery licence comes up for renewal in 2023 against probable competition from billionaire media mogul Richard Desmond, who runs the Health Lottery. The other main rival, Sir Richard Branson, is understood to have withdrawn from the race in light of the turmoil at Covid-hit Virgin.

Sir Hugh, who was installed in 2018, is “not embarrassed” to admit the National Lottery lost its way after the ticket price hike in 2013, followed by a misguided advertising campaign featuring celebrities including Katie Price, Noel Edmonds and Piers Morgan.

“I was really worried in Rio, when I got this sense that this wonderful thing might be about to go wrong,” he said.

In response to the negative publicity, Camelot overhauled the board and executive, rethought the games and changed the prizes.

Last year, its total ticket sales topped £7.2 billion, of which £1.6 billion was raised for National Lottery projects, £4.1 billion was paid in prizes, £864.8 million went to the Government in Lottery Duty and £303.9million went to retailers’ commission.

“I’m not allowed to play but if I won a life-changing sum, I would absolutely stay doing this, because I love it,” Sir Hugh insisted. “It would be interesting to ask people after two months of lockdown, if they won the money whether they’d want to stay at home for a little longer or go back to work!”