What has the National Lottery ever done for the arts?
With the winner of the new 10-year Lottery contract soon to be announced, James Hall assesses the funding system’s pros and cons
Visitors to the Tetley contemporary art gallery in an old brewery in Leeds may not know it, but they’re benefiting from a scratchcard you bought last week. National Lottery money has supported numerous creative projects at the gallery, most recently the Tiny Tetley Studio, a striking art deco-themed space for children. Lottery cash funds a programme to bring youngsters from disadvantaged postcodes to the Studio. Such money makes a “huge difference” in connecting the people of Leeds with art, says the Tetley’s director Bryony Bond.
The Tetley is one of many thousands of arts organisations to have benefited since the Lottery was launched in 1994, in what marked the biggest shake-up in arts funding in Britain since the Second World War. Other projects and venues to have received money range from the totemic (Angel of the North) to the tiny (the Campbeltown Picture House in Argyll and Bute). Over the Lottery’s first six years alone, 500 arts centres, theatres, concert halls and galleries were either built or refurbished. Films helped by Lottery money include The King’s Speech and Gosford Park. Of the £45billion generated for good causes since the Lottery’s launch, around £9billion has gone to the arts.
Those who were around at the start say the Lottery has “transformed” the arts over the past 25 years. Lord Smith of Finsbury, a former culture secretary, says: “It has given the entire arts sector a real spirit of confidence and the ability to develop in ways which would have been impossible without it.” But with the announcement of the winner of a lucrative new 10-year National Lottery contract imminent, such claims bear scrutiny. To what extent has the money pumped into the arts paid dividends? And what could be done better?
Firstly, an explainer. The way money is distributed from ticket and scratchcard sales is complicated. The gambling money is collected by the National Lottery’s operator – for now Camelot, which is rebidding – and a significant chunk of this is passed on to the National Lottery Distribution Fund
(NLDF), an arms-length part of the culture department. The NLDF divides up this “good cause” money for disbursement by 12 sports, arts, heritage and charity bodies. The funds are split so that 40 per cent goes to charity, health, education and environmental causes, while 20 per cent apiece goes to the arts, sport, and national heritage. So of the £1.8 billion received by the NLDF last year, £363 million went to UK arts organisations.
The bodies that distribute this arts cash are Arts Council England (ACE), the British Film Institute, Creative Scotland, Arts Council of Wales and Arts Council of Northern Ireland. The most noticeable finding from a trawl of ACE’S accounts – it’s by far the biggest distributing body – is that Lottery funding has dwindled when adjusted for inflation. In 1996, the first full year after the Lottery’s launch, ACE received £244 million from NLDF, worth £487 million in today’s money after inflation. By 2001, the inflation-adjusted figure had dropped to £322 million. By 2011, it was £233 million. Last year it was only marginally higher at £253 million. At a House of Commons hearing this month, ACE’S chief executive Darren Henley admitted that funding is rising by less than inflation. And this means progressively less money for the arts. It’s particularly galling when Camelot’s profits rose from £29 million in 2010 to £78 million in 2020. Whoever wins the new licence must tie the amount they make in profits to the amount they hand out, Henley argues.
We know there are four bidders for the new contract: Camelot, Europe’s largest lottery operator Allwyn, Italian lottery operator Sisal and Richard Desmond’s Northern & Shell, which runs the Health Lottery. Regulator the Gambling Commission will announce a “preferred applicant” later this month, with Lottery insiders saying a decision could come as soon as next week. The new licence will start in February 2024, but some involved believe the losers will demand a judicial review as soon as any decision is announced, so hotly contested and potentially lucrative is the contract. The Gambling Commission said recent press reports naming Camelot as the preferred bidder were “incorrect” – no decision has yet been made, they say.
What about punters? Are more people visiting museums, galleries and theatres since the Lottery launched? Official figures say yes, by around a third. But because most venues’ funds come from numerous sources, it’s impossible to say how much of this is directly Lottery-related. A 2009 poll by think tank Theos found that 81 per cent of Brits said neither they nor their close families had benefited from a Lottery-funded project. A person connected to the current bidding process claims that little has changed perception-wise in the 13 years since. “There has been poor communication,” this individual says. So the Lottery’s irrefutable dividends appear to be both intangible and underappreciated. Which begs the question, does giving out Lottery cash to myriad grass roots organisations work if most people don’t know they’re benefiting from it? Surely large capital projects – such as the Royal Opera House refurbishment – are far more likely to have an impact on people’s awareness? Well, yes. But then Lottery funding risks being labelled elitist. It’s a conundrum.
An ACE spokesman says Lottery funding has touched millions of lives. A recent initiative called Creative People and Places funded projects in culturally deprived areas: yet some 83 per cent of the 7.4 million people who visited these projects do not regularly engage with arts and culture, the spokesman said. Such are the Lottery’s silent tentacles. Some arts sectors have historically felt hard done by. UK Music, the music industry’s umbrella body, claimed in 2018 that ACE was “too posh for pop”, with opera getting £8 for every £1 awarded to pop music. Jamie Njoku-goodwin, UK Music’s chief executive, says things are much improved. Rapper Little Simz, who last month won the Brit Award for Best New Artist, received two rounds of Lottery funding early in her career. “I do get a genuine sense that the Arts Council want to be doing as much as they can,” says Njoku-goodwin.
Then there’s the complexity. The process of applying for a National Lottery grant of between £1,000 and £100,000 from ACE is labyrinthine. I know because I tried. Applications are made via a ferocious-looking online portal called Grantium. But first you need to register – and it can take up to 10 days to be validated. Frankly, I felt it would be less technically challenging to construct the Angel of the North in my own back garden. There are also extraordinary amounts of box-ticking and benchmarking. ACE projects must meet strict “investment principles” based on inclusivity and relevance. These are important issues. But they’re utterly irrelevant if the applicant has been swamped by bureaucracy and given up.
Lord Smith says there’s too much red tape. “Very often small-scale local organisations, which are quite frequently run by volunteers, don’t have the skills, time, experience or expertise to fill out endless forms and to make the perfect application that perhaps a more professional organisation might be able to do,” he says. So, squeezed funds, unnoticed benefits, historic feelings of exclusion and acres of bureaucracy all suggest an imperfect system (ACE say they are working on “upgrades” to Grantium to improve the experience).
But, overall, the impact of the Lottery on the arts is best tackled as a counterfactual question: what would have happened without it? Lord Smith is clear: “We wouldn’t have a whole range of modern and enhanced buildings, rejuvenated museums and other organisations all around the country. We would also have lost out on a huge amount of artistic activity.”