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The news this week that Camelot are doubling the price of lottery tickets has stirred some interest in a report we published a few years ago.

The National Lottery: Is it Progressive? (that’s progressive in the economic, rather than the political, sense) analysed both rates of play and where the good cause money raised through the lottery was spent. 

On average, richer and poorer households were spending similar amounts on draw-based games (both £141 per year) but markedly different sums on scratch cards (£41 and £55 respectively). This absolute difference translated into a significant proportional difference. Whereas the average individual from a £40,000 household spends less than 0.5% of their pre-tax income on the lottery, the average individual from a £20,000 household spends proportionally more than twice as much.

The National Lottery is unusual in that it is a form of gambling promoted by the state as a public good. Roughly speaking, the end justifies the means – the end being the money raised for charities, the arts, heritage and sports (including £2.2 billion for the Olympic Park). Camelot have argued the toss about differential rates of playing and spending in the past, but most people accept that the less well off people play more – it’s just that their spending isn’t sufficiently high to cause concern. 

I think that something about the lottery has changed since we wrote the report, and I’m not talking about the ticket price. When the single weekly draw was introduced in 1994, the core principle behind the way the income was spent was ‘additionality’. Under the principle of additionality, the money raised by the National Lottery should only be spent on projects that are additional to core public sector responsibilities. Two years ago, subtle changes were suggested by the Office for Civil Society, moving from additionality to additionality/complementarity – “the development of programmes and funding of projects should complement and add value to the plans of action and activity of other funders and parties working towards the Fund’s goals, including Government funding”.

This is Big Society stuff. Charities, many funded by the Big Lottery Fund, move in to the gaps left by cuts to government spending on welfare, benefits and funding for local authorities. Reductions in spending were, of course, the result of gambling of a different kind and a different order – that prevalent in parts of the banking system, where all the risks were ultimately borne by the tax payer.

This is a triple-whammy. Lower socio-economic groups have suffered most from the economic downturn – from joblessness, low and stagnating pay and from inflation. They have suffered most as government spending has been reduced, benefits pegged back and services withdrawn. Now lottery money – disproportionately coming from their pockets – is subsidising (sorry, ‘complementing’) government funding for remaining services.

The problem with opposing the National Lottery is that one is easily cast as a latter-day Puritan, denying people of a simple – and relatively cheap – pleasure. Why can’t we be allowed a little flutter, and the dream of a better life (“life changing” is the current National Lottery strapline)? No-one has a gun to anyone’s head, do they?

Opponents are then hit with the cheapest of shots – the Lottery doesn’t hurt anyone… Fair enough, hurting isn’t the right word. It’s more like robbing.

Paul Bickley is the Director of Political Programme at Theos | @mrbickley

Image by K J Payne from flickr.com available under this Creative Commons Licence.