Is it a lottery or a tax?

The UK’s National Lottery raises over £30 million each and every week for good causes. It has been a phenomenal success ever since it was first introduced some 18 years ago, so much so, that almost 80% of the UK adult (16 or over) population regularly buy lottery tickets.

The money raised goes to help a myriad of different things. In the Cambridgeshire area over the past few years, examples of the type of causes that have received grants include children’s activity clubs, a kidney disease research project, the Age Concern charity, a sports project for the blind, a grant for the Citizens Advise Bureaux and a community transport scheme for the disadvantaged.

Over the past seven years since the UK were awarded the 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games, almost £1,800m of lottery funding has gone towards the building of the infrastructure required to run a successful games.

All of these are good worthwhile causes that most of us imagine lottery funding was meant for. What is often forgotten, is that before the advent of the National Lottery, many of these types of grants came from the local council funded by our taxes. Certainly there was no lottery funding for the Olympic Games when they were held in London in 1908 and 1948, it was the government that paid for those games. Admittedly, nothing like as much infrastructure was required, but nevertheless, whatever was spent came from tax revenues.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m certainly not complaining about how lottery funding is distributed; in fact I think the organisation responsible for distributing lottery funds does an admirable job.

We’ll never know, but had it not been for the National lottery, I wonder how much more of our taxes would have gone towards the 1,000’s of projects including the London Olympics that the lottery fund has helped over the last 18 years.

We can’t blame the lottery for our current woes regarding the economy, but perhaps it has gone a long way towards helping the overall rise in the standard of living that we in the UK have experienced over the past 18 years.

I don’t think we can ever say that the lottery is just another tax, but what we can say is that it has been a good thing for everyone.