National Lottery £38 billion pledge for good causes ‘looks fanciful’ The National Lottery operator’s pledge spend £38 billion on good causes by 2034 “looks fanciful”, a viscount has warned.
Tory peer Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay referred to a legal challenge against the Gambling Commission by The New Lottery Company, a subsidiary of Northern and Shell, which lost out on the National Lottery contract and is seeking damages, claiming the regulator failed to fairly run the licence bidding process.
Viscount Chandos asked gambling minister Baroness Twycross to say whether the watchdog was “taken for a ride” before it awarded Allwyn a 10-year licence to run the National Lottery, which kicked in last year.
Lord Sahota, a Labour peer, said: “In my previous life, I sold National Lottery tickets for years and years, and I always got the impression that the National Lottery was a tax on the poor.
Former GambleAware chair of trustees Baroness Lampard, an independent crossbencher, described the National Lottery’s past investment into gambling harms research, education and treatment as “derisory”, including under its previous operator Camelot.
