The National Lottery Community Fund (NLCF) has reduced the sum it expects to be repaid out of the £675m borrowed by the government in 2007 to fund the 2012 Olympics.
In its 2025-26 annual report, NLCF said that Greater London Authority (GLA) has forecast that the money returned to it in 2030 would be “substantially lower” than its original contribution.
This comes after Gordon Brown’s Labour government in 2007 re-routed £675m raised through lottery sales to pay for the 2012 London Olympics.
Of this, £425m – which would have otherwise been distributed to charities by the NLCF – was spent on the 2012 Olympic and Paralympic games.
The Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) and the GLA are reported to have previously agreed that the £675m contribution would be repaid once the Olympic Park in Stratford was developed and sold.
NLCF, in its most recent accounts, revealed that it still has not received any money back 14 years after the games.
“There is uncertainty over the timing and amount of actual proceeds, which are dependent on a number of factors including land sales and prevailing housing market conditions.
“Given these uncertainties a reliable estimate of a contingent asset cannot currently be made,” NLCF added.
A City Hall spokesperson said the amount payable by the GLA to NLCF would depend on the total receipts generated from land sales.
DCMS said the GLA attributed wider macroeconomic conditions such as inflation, construction delays and house price changes as factors behind the non-payment.
Call for new PM to repay NLCF immediately
Jay Kennedy, policy and research lead at the Directory of Social Change (DSC), called for Prime Minister Andy Burnham to pay back the lottery distributors in full now.
“Voluntary organisations, community groups and charities should have benefited from the money that the government raided to build infrastructure on the Olympic park.
“£425m of that funding should have gone to grants for local charities and community groups,” Kennedy added. “It wasn’t. We’ll never know the full scale of the damage that was done as a result.”
DCMS told Civil Society that financial returns to distributors were based on land sales, which GLA said have not happened.
The government department added that it continues to engage with the GLA to recoup the funds so it can repay NLCF.
A spokesperson for Mayor of London Sadiq Khan said that the GLA expects to pay DCMS a share of the net proceeds from the sale of land holdings in 2029.
City Hall added that the 2012 Olympics was instrumental in transforming east London and driving “billions of pounds of additional investment for new homes, transport links, business districts and entertainment”.
