Tories slam Labour on Lottery

Labour has been accused of “divert[ing] almost £3.5bn away from the original good causes and into its own pet projects” by Shadow Culture Secretary Jeremy Hunt, in a speech to mark the fifteenth anniversary of the National Lottery. Hunt praised Lottery-supported projects including Tate Modern, the Eden Project, and the Leeds City Museum and Resource Centre, but said that “£240m less is going into the arts [now] than in 1997”. The Conservatives claim that the seven main distributors of Lottery funds spent £120m on admin last year – 11% of their funds. He pledged that under a Tory government the “mushrooming of administration costs” would be capped at 5%. He also said that the Conservatives would ask all distributors of Lottery money to allow the public to decide on at least one major funding project every year.