Yorkshire charities are losers as Lottery promises broken

Over the last decade nearly £1bn has been spent by the Lottery on good causes in the region – but a Yorkshire Post investigation has revealed that after Whitehall announced it would direct £675m to the Olympics those contributions have plummeted.

At the time it was understood the funding would be returned soon after the Games closed, particularly when it later emerged the event was likely to come in around £500m under budget.

However the Government is now planning on returning the funds when Olympics assets are sold – which will be “some time in the 2020s”.

Furthermore the Department for Culture Media and Sport has refused to answer what it will do with the £476m underspend – previously retained as contingency during the Games – as campaigners call for it to be returned to help the hundreds of struggling charitable causes that lost money.

The Yorkshire Post can reveal that from 2002 to 2007 the National Lottery spent on average £118m a year on good causes in the region but since 2008, the year after the announcement was made, that has more than halved to £57m a year.

It comes at a desperately difficult time for the region’s charities and new research, released today by umbrella group Involve Yorkshire and Humber which represents nearly 15,000 third sector organisations, reveals around a third are living off savings to survive.

Hundreds of charities have joined forces under a group called the Big Lottery Refund to campaign for the money to be returned. The campaign, being lead by the Directory of Social Change, aims to get £425m paid back to the Big Lottery Fund immediately.

Jay Kennedy, Head of Policy at the Directory of Social Change, said: “The figures clearly show a sharp drop in Lottery funding going into the Yorkshire and the Humber region from 2008 onwards, which is startling.

“There may be a number of factors related to this, but the previous Government’s raid on lottery funding to support the Olympics has to be the primary cause.

“This is a massive amount of money taken out of the pot which normally provides grants for small local charities and community groups. And the timing proved to be disastrous – as these are obviously recession years when demand for many charitable services has increased, whilst other sources of funding and support have declined.

“The Government has already promised to pay this back, but is saying it won’t happen until the ‘mid-2020s’ at the earliest isn’t acceptable – especially when they have the capacity to do it now, having forecasted nearly £500m of unspent contingency.”

In June 2007 the then Olympics Minister, Tessa Jowell, told the House of Commons that the Government had agreed a Memorandum of Understanding with the Mayor of London, designed in part to reimburse the Big Lottery Fund for lost revenues, by using the proceeds from selling Olympics assets.

At the time she said this would: “Give lottery distributors real confidence that the additional funding necessary for a successful Olympic and Paralympic Games will be re-paid – providing them and the whole country with a further 2012 dividend.”

But in response to a Parliamentary Question the Government said the money will not be available for at least another decade.

John Penrose MP, the Olympics Minister, stated: “The development of the Olympic park is a long-term programme, with land sales due to take place over a period of 25 years.

“Given the timescale of the development programme and its dependence on market performance, we cannot be certain about the timing, but the current estimate from the Olympic Park Legacy Company is that the distributors should start to receive payments in the mid-2020s.”

When asked if the Government would commit to refunding the underspend, a DCMS spokeswoman said: “With the Paralympics yet to be staged, we are only still only halfway through delivering the Games.”