Six months on from Olympics and still no refund of lottery cash
Howard Lake | 13 February 2013 | News
The closing ceremony at the London Olympics took place six months ago, but still there is no sign that the Government will make good its promised refund of lottery cash to charities, according to the Directory of Social Change (DSC).
The organisation's Big Lottery Refund campaign aims to secure £425 million of the money taken from the Big Lottery Fund to pay for the London Olympics, and therefore diverted from charitable good causes across the UK. It has issued a dummy invoice to the Government for the outstanding sum marked "6 months overdue".
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Over 3300 charities have now joined the Big Lottery Refund campaign.
£150m offered in 2014
DSC’s Chief Executive Debra Allcock Tyler said: "It is increasingly clear that hundreds of millions in the Olympic budget remain unspent. There is a clear moral case for the swift return of these funds to the lottery good causes which sacrificed to make the Games a success. Depriving communities and vulnerable people of vital support during these difficult times amounts to moral theft and cannot continue. The government needs to pay back the money that was borrowed now."
Sports Minister Hugh Robertson recently stated that up to £150 million in lottery cash taken for the Olympics could be returned to the lottery distributors in 2014. DSC argues that this is not enough and not soon enough.
Supporters of the campaign are invited to download the 'overdue invoice' for £425 million and send it to the Prime Minister, Chancellor and Culture Secretary.
www.biglotteryrefund.org.uk
About Howard Lake
Howard Lake is consultant editor of UK Fundraising. He founded the site in 1994 and successfully sold it in 2022. As director of Giving X Ltd he is exploring growing giving on a massive scale.
He is the founder of Fundraising Camp and co-founder of GoodJobs.