No more Lottery cash ‘diversions’ for Olympics, claims Purnell

Published Wednesday 16 January 2008 at 11:50 by Lalayn Baluch

Culture secretary James Purnell has vowed that there will be no further raids on Lottery arts money to subsidise the Olympics.

He also announced that Camelot, which has just renewed its license to administer the lottery for a third time, intends to invest between £600 million and £1 billion into the Lottery Good Causes pot.

Purnell’s promise comes as a relief to the arts industry, which lost out on £137 million of public cash to the 2012 Games, following last year’s Lottery raid.

Speaking in the House of Commons, he said: “I can confirm today that there will be no further diversion from the Lottery Good Causes to fund the Olympics.”

Meanwhile, Olympics minister Tessa Jowell reiterated Purnell’s assurance and said that the Olympics should not be seen as a “battle” to the arts and heritage sectors.

Responding to the announcement, National Campaign for the Arts director Louise de Winter said that she was pleased the government had listened to the case made by the arts industry.

She added: “This is a small beam of light at the end of a dark tunnel. In spite of a positive spending review settlement for the arts, there are many arts organisations facing funding cuts as a result of reduced Lottery funds. This provides some degree of comfort that the situation should not, at least, be made worse by any further shortfall in the Olympics budget.

“The NCA is working with the arts sector to campaign for a dedicated pot of funding for arts organisations to bid for, to support projects within the Cultural Olympiad. We will continue to campaign for sustained investment in the arts at the next spending review expected in 2011.”

Conservative shadow culture secretary Jeremy Hunt, meanwhile, warned that the arts could still lose out due to over-valuing of the proceeds from land which will be sold after the Olympics, the profits of which are promised to go back into the Lottery.

He commented: “While we welcome the fact that James Purnell appears to have given the assurance we demanded that there should be no further raids on good causes to fund the Olympics it now looks like those same good causes will be crippled because of hopelessly optimistic projections made by the government as to the value of land proceeds which good causes are supposed to receive after 2012.

“Until we get a fully transparent budget, the public will worry that once again the government’s figures won’t add up and problems such as these will happen again and again.”