Charity lotteries should not be limited to turning over £10m, nor should they have to return 20 per cent of their turnover to good causes within one year, according to a new report by nfpSynergy.

As the DCMS has yet to publish its consultation into society lottery reform, nfpSynergy, which has been leading the sector charge on the subject, has released a report with a set of recommendations which it says will unleash more money to good causes.

Key among the recommendations is the call to remove the £10m limit on the amount any one charity or ‘society’ lottery can turn over in one year. The report suggests this would not pose any threat to the position of the National  Lottery, which gives a greater proportion of its turnover to good causes, because “the National Lottery doesn’t need protecting”.

Commenting on the perceived need to protect the national game from the likes of upstart Health Lottery, which is 1 per cent of the former’s size, nfpSynergy’s Joe Saxton said: “It’s like protecting the US military from the threat of Iceland.”

“The current set up is a win/lose in favour of the National Lottery because the charity lotteries are deliberately restricted to stop them competing,” said Saxton.

nfpSynergy had originally floated the idea that the 80:20 rule, which presently demands that a society lottery returns 20 per cent of turnover to charity within each programme, be averaged out over five years, but in the new report – titled ‘A chance to give’, the group suggests this be averaged out over three years. This would chime with the Institute of Fundraising’s call for the rule to be more flexible, but does not go as far as the Health Lottery whose chief executive said the minimum percentage returning to charity should be lowered to something like 15 per cent.

Although Camelot, which runs the National Lottery, had not seen the nfpSynergy report, a spokesman for the company reiterated its position against loosening the minimum return and raising the turnover cap.

“Camelot believes that all lotteries should deliver social good by raising as much money as possible for their beneficiaries, not the people running them. However, in respect of industrial-scale, mass-market society lotteries, we don’t believe that the 20 per cent minimum amount that they are currently required to return to their good causes meets this goal. We therefore believe that the Government, in its forthcoming consultation on society lotteries, is right to explore different ways of ensuring that all lotteries deliver the maximum benefit to good causes,” he said.
 
“We’ve co-existed peacefully alongside society lotteries for many years now because we fulfil two completely different but very important roles: we’re tasked with running a UK-wide lottery for the benefit of National Lottery good causes throughout the UK, while society lotteries operate on a local, rather than national, basis. We believe that increasing the cap on turnover, and therefore prize limits, for society lotteries risks blurring this crucial distinction.”