* However, from this, £43.4m was transferred to the Olympic Lottery Distribution Fund. £10.8m had been taken in the previous year. Source: HLF Annual Reports
Income from the National Lottery derives from ticket sales. Interest in playing the games seems to have fallen in the mid-2010s, but revived again as recession set in – it seems that poorer people gamble more when economically threatened. Unfortunately all of the increase (and more) in 2009/2010 was lost because £43.4 million was “stolen” to help fund the 2012 London Olympics (see Table 3.1).
Investment income from the National Lottery Development Fund (which holds lottery income, maximizing investment income, and releases it to the distributing bodies as required) crashed spectacularly over the past five years because of significant reductions in market interest rates and gilt yields. So, overall, annual income into the HLF fell by a quarter because of an increasingly challenging economic climate and a raid to support the Olympics. However, as the recession continues to bite, the number of lottery tickets sold has been increasing. As of February 2012, projections suggested that the HLF is likely to see its share of funding rise over the next five years. £1.42 billion is expected to be available between 2011/2012 and 2015/2016 – a 14.7 percent increase on 2010 projections (Kendall 2012).
Legislation and amendments
During the earliest years of HLF’s distribution of funding, discussion of its grant awards was dominated by three questions:
1 1. Were the trustees allocating huge grants to the big heritage institutions and neglecting “grass roots” heritage?
2 2. Were some regions (usually a euphemism for London and the South East) getting a disproportionate slice of the lottery cake?
3 3. Were some heritage sectors doing rather better than others?
TABLE 3.2 Heritage Lottery Fund – distribution of awards by size of grant
| Financial year | % by total value of awards going to grants of under £1m | % of total value of awards going to grants of £5m and over |
| 2002/2003 | 35.9 | 33.0 |
| 2003/2004 | 37.4 | 26.3 |
| 2004/2005 | 36.6 | 28.8 |
| 2005/2006 | 39.7 | 28.7 |
| 2006/2007 | 40.8 | 25.6 |
| 2007/2008 | 44.0 | 21.7 |
Source: HLF Annual Reports
The government issues “policy directions” to the lottery distributors, steering them toward ensuring that their independent policies and grant criteria take full account of the government’s own policy. DCMS used policy directions to intervene on the first question, trying to ensure that HLF recognized that the heritage can be tangible (e.g., a church) and intangible (e.g., oral histories); that it is owned and supported by millions, not just an elite few; and that access to lottery funding must indeed be “for the many not just a few.”
The 1997 Act empowered Trustees to assist projects (revenue as well as capital) directed to increasing public understanding and enjoyment of the heritage, and to interpreting and recording important aspects of the nation’s history, natural history, and landscape. Similarly, responding to policy directions meant eventually that a much broader definition of “heritage projects” was accepted and small grants for small community organizations for what they considered to be heritage was encouraged and enabled. The impact of its intervention can be seen in Table 3.2, which shows that the percentage of grant money being allocated to smaller projects increased and the amount allocated to large capital projects fell.
The second and third questions were closely monitored by HLF themselves. With the coming of New Labour in 1997 and a wider definition of what heritage was, it became easier to ensure that grants were not skewed toward major museums or the most well-known heritage sites (Table 3.2). Grants could be mapped against population densities and “cold spots” identified. HLF also set up development teams in each region who actively helped potential applicants to reach the point where they could submit a proposal. In these ways HLF tried to ensure a fair distribution of lottery money back into the communities that had funded it.
The 1998 Act enabled HLF to “regionalize” by setting up 12 committees in the nations and English regions to which decisions (up to a certain grant size ceiling) could be delegated. It also meant the setting up of regional offices which helped HLF counter complaints that HLF was too London-focused, and not sufficiently in touch with grass-roots heritage across the UK. It also helped ensure a greater degree of fairness in geographical distribution, as discussed above.
Effects
All in all, New Labour may be able to claim that its interventions democratized the distribution of lottery grants to the heritage. On its part, HLF may be equally justified in feeling that it has retained its integrity and not deviated from only supporting heritage that merited it.
Case study 2: Renaissance in the Regions
Since 2003, groups of museums in each of the
