HL Deb 30 March 2001 vol 624 cc548-54

11.53 a.m.

Lord McIntosh of Haringey

rose to move, That the draft order laid before the House on 1st March be approved [10th Report from the Joint Committee].

The noble Lord said: My Lords, the purpose of the order is to specify seven new initiatives that will be funded by the National Lottery through the New Opportunities Fund.

When in 1997 the Government proposed introducing a sixth good cause for health, education and the environment there was widespread public support for targeting lottery funding in those areas. Since then the New Opportunities Fund has made a real difference to people's lives—£1.5 billion has already been committed to six successful initiatives.

There are two of those existing schemes which we now propose to expand, in addition to the new initiatives which are the main focus of the order. Two hundred and five million pounds has already been allocated to out-of-school-hours learning. In June 1999 we announced that £60 million would be made available through that initiative and through Sport England to establish and support school sports coordinators, who organise competitive sport and after school activities for young people. The out-of-school-hours initiative has been a popular one and less than we anticipated has been available to fund the activities of sports coordinators. We therefore propose to allocate a further £25.5 million to the initiative to fund the activities of sports coordinators and their equivalents across the UK.

Under another successful initiative, £250 million has provided ICT training for teachers and librarians. We know, however, that there have been concerns that home and hospital tuition service teachers have not been eligible to apply. We shall therefore allocate a further £1 million to extend the programme to cover teachers employed by LEAs to provide education for pupils at home or in hospital.

When the Millennium Commission's share of lottery proceeds transfers to NOF in August the fund will receive one-third of all lottery proceeds—amounting to around £500 million a year. That is why in November last year we issued the consultation paper New Opportunities from the Lottery to seek views on a range of new initiatives. Four hundred and thirty responses to the paper were received across the UK, the overwhelming majority of which were very supportive of the proposed initiatives. Our draft directions to the New Opportunities Fund, which set the framework for the new initiatives and were made available to Members on 9th March, have been developed with the benefit of the many useful comments made.

The New Opportunities Fund has so far done well to deliver a wide range of different initiatives. I am sure that it will rise to the challenge of getting the next tranche of programmes up and running as soon as it can, and we shall look at ways of helping it to do that, where necessary by removing inappropriate bureaucratic controls. There may be instances, for example, where published criteria make it clear which groups or areas are the intended beneficiaries of a particular programme without the need for formal application procedures. We shall therefore consider whether there is a need to change the financial directions to reflect that.

I shall outline our proposals for new initiatives. Sport has an important role to play in inspiring young people and motivating them to aim high. The sum of £750 million for sport in schools will help to bring about a huge expansion in the provision of sports facilities for young people and the wider communities in which they live. Priority will be given to areas of urban and rural deprivation but all local education authorities will benefit.

This will also provide up to £50 million to support the building or refurbishing of outdoor adventure facilities, particularly where that will benefit young people who do not currently have ready access to such facilities. More than £44 million will allow young people to take part in adventure programmes and other challenging activities. Secondary school leavers who have no idea of what to do at the end of compulsory schooling are far more likely to slip into long-term unemployment. We want to improve their self-confidence and increase the number who go into further education, training or a job with training.

Over £213 million will be available to boost the fight against heart disease and stroke, and to provide extra money for the existing initiative to beat cancer. The initiative will help improve diagnosis and treatment, areas often funded through appeals and charitable donations, leading to inequalities in provision. It will help to improve cardiac rehabilitation and palliative care by improving access to safe, modern and convenient facilities. It will take effective action to prevent coronary heart disease, stroke and cancer, focusing on areas such as stopping smoking, increasing fruit and vegetable consumption and physical activity.

The palliative care programme for adults and children with life-threatening and chronic illnesses will support more patients, families and carers wishing to stay in their own homes and communities. It will provide support for carers during bereavement. Children's hospices will also be eligible for support. The sum of £84 million will be available for this initiative.

The sum of £198.5 million will be available for childcare provision, funding capital projects that benefit up to three year-olds in socially excluded communities. It will also provide further support for childcare projects in deprived areas.

The sum of £159 million will be available for a wide-ranging initiative to transform communities. Funding will help to improve the appearance and amenities of specific local environments in both urban and rural areas and will also be available to expand community sector waste re-use, recycling and composting. Fifty million pounds of the funding for this initiative will be available to develop renewable energy sources, building generating capacity for electricity from energy crops, building offshore wind electricity generation projects, and developing small-scale biomass heat and power projects. In Scotland, £10 million will be directed towards projects which explore new kinds of community rehabilitation of people who misuse or have misused drugs.

Awards for All has been an extremely popular and successful programme under which distributors have joined forces to help support local groups in making small-scale grants. Sixty million punds over three years will allow NOF to join the programme and fund a wide range of health education and environment projects of between £500 and £5,000. The fund will make some of this funding available to support projects which celebrate the Queen's Jubilee in 2002.

The response to public consultation has shown overwhelming support for our programme proposals. The creation of the New Opportunities Fund has already helped thousands of communities to improve health, education and local environments. The latest round of grants will make a real difference to school sports facilities, as well as helping local communities to create a better environment and provide much-needed care support. I commend the order to the House.

Moved, That the draft order laid before the House on 1st March be approved [10th Report from the Joint Committed].—(Lord McIntosh of Haringey.)

Noon

Baroness Anelay of St Johns

My Lords, I thank the Minister for that explanation. As so often happens in this House, the noble Lord has managed to be more concise and clear than his colleagues in another place, for which I thank him. We do not oppose the making of the order and as my honourable friend John Greenway explained in another place we confirm that, if we were in a position to do so, we would honour the government funding pledges made in this order. At some stage in the future we would wish to review the scope of NOF activity, but as a fund it would not be abolished. However, that does not mean that the order should go through on the nod and I have one or two questions which need to be answered. I have limited my questions to only a few to reflect the fact that the Minister has been concise.

As he concluded his explanation to this House, the Minister referred to the popularity of the fund. In another place, the Minister, Kate Hoey, told the House that additionality was a recurrent theme contained in the responses sent in to the consultation paper, New Opportunities from the Lottery. She explained that respondents wanted assurances that the initiatives funded by NOF would be additional to and not substitutes for government spending—and quite right too. That is a theme to which I have returned again and again during our debates on the lottery and I do not apologise for returning to it once more today, however briefly.

We have been told repeatedly that the New Opportunities Fund does not breach additionality and yet, in the same breath, Ministers then often go on to explain how it does so. For example, one of the schemes which we have been told about today will provide teachers for pupils to be taught at home. I am puzzled why that is not the responsibility of the DfEE budget. Surely such a provision should be the subject of core funding. There is also the question of childcare, again a project which we wholeheartedly support. It is clear that it is a good project. But it seems odd that it has become a lottery responsibility. Why have the Government shuffled this away from the responsibility of the Chancellor of the Exchequer and on to the lottery?

I was also interested to hear that the Government are continuing to use the NOF to bypass the authority of other lottery funding bodies such as Sport England. We welcome wholeheartedly lottery support for schools and arts projects; indeed, especially those projects aimed at schools. When we set up the lottery we made quite sure that such projects were defined as good causes. Why have the Government funded sports coordinators through the New Opportunities Fund? Why do they not trust Sport England to take decisions as regards the priorities for lottery spending in sport and make those grants direct? Why add yet another layer of bureaucracy to the granting of lottery money?

Will the Minister answer the question put in another place by my honourable friend John Greenway, but which the Minister for Sport failed to answer? How many sports coordinators are in place this month? When my honourable friend asked that question, the Minister rather unhelpfully gave him the number that will be in place from September rather than now. The Minister has said that the Government wish to see around 1,000 sports coordinators in place by 2004. Is it intended that they should be in place by the beginning or by the end of that year? It is important that we are given an idea of when the coordinators will be fully in post.

As we have said on past occasions, we value those proposals which relate to matters such as cancer care, always provided that they are additional to the care that should be made available through the National Health Service. We welcome, too, the proposals in paragraph (8) and those that are partly included in paragraph (7) to support schemes that will help our community life to prosper. Certainly, if we had the opportunity, we would wish to establish a community fund for that very purpose. In particular we welcome the plans indicated in the order to celebrate the Queen's Jubilee next year.

I have one or two questions to put to the Minister about those proposals. First, why is lottery money being used to fund schemes to generate heat and power? That merely seems rather quirky. Secondly, can the Minister confirm today that New Opportunities Fund money for community renewal will be made available in particular to those rural areas hit so disastrously by the foot and mouth outbreak?

Viscount Falkland

My Lords, we on these Benches also thank the Minister for explaining in such detail the specific initiatives contained in the order. We have nothing particular add to the points raised by the noble Baroness. Indeed, we support her in her remarks about the need for further clarification on the additionality aspect of this funding. As regards the initiative to offer funding that will enable children to be taught at home, will that include the increasing number of disruptive children who are being excluded from school, no doubt for perfectly good reasons? That appears to be a matter well outside normal funding arrangements in education and I hope that that will be reflected in this new initiative.

As I have said, the matter of additionality needs to be explained a little further. A number of initiatives are not defined clearly as falling outside the accepted scope of funding, but they are subject to certain budgetary constraints which may well be got round by putting them into a list such as that contained in the order.

Having said that, the success of the New Opportunities Fund depends on the continuing success of the lottery—and a grand success it has been. I am sure that the Minister recognises that more than most, in particular in the area of the arts. Let us hope that that will continue.

Lord McIntosh of Haringey

My Lords, I am grateful to both noble Lords who have contributed to the debate. Of course the important point, as the noble Baroness, Lady Anelay, recognised—she has been consistent in making the point, but I do not complain about that in any way—is the issue of additionality. The best way to make clear how we are preserving additionality is to say that additionality does not mean that we shall spend money only on matters on which central government could not spend money, but also on matters on which central government would not spend money. The Government and the taxpayer can pay for anything they like. In that sense, any expenditure of lottery money involves issues of additionality.

But the example of childcare given by the noble Baroness illustrates my point most effectively. We introduced the National Childcare Strategy in May 1998. It aims to ensure the provision of good quality, affordable childcare for children aged from 0 to 15, and up to the age of 16 for children with special needs. The Government have already made provision from central funds—from the taxpayer—of £300 million towards the strategy for 1998–2003. What we are doing with the money targeted for funding childcare here is adding to public expenditure, particularly in deprived areas as well as for capital projects which it would not otherwise be possible to realise from the money which has been allocated by the taxpayer. That illustrates the difference between the two sources of funding and why these proposals do not breach additionality.

The noble Baroness asked me about the relationship with Sport England and the sport lottery distributors. The policy directions which were made available to the House state that NOF projects should be complementary to, and not in competition with, planned provision from other lottery distributors. That means that NOF will work with the sport lottery distributors to ensure that the money goes where it is most needed. In England, the school sports allowance will be very important in the implementation of this initiative. So they are genuinely complementary rather than competitive.

So far as concerns school sports co-ordinators, there are 145 in place now; there will be approximately 200 in September; and we aim to have 1,000 by the end of 2004. However, in practice, with any luck, it could be earlier than that. So we have kept the matter deliberately vague in that sense.

The noble Baroness, Lady Anelay, asked me how expenditure on heat and power generation was appropriate. The answer is that these are part of community initiatives. It is when communities wish to save themselves money by setting up installations for a wide variety of renewable energy that NOF money would become available for that purpose. It is rather different from commercial energy policy.

As to the question raised by the noble Viscount, Lord Falkland, in regard to home teaching, yes, of course, the teaching of disruptive children is included. However, as the money is not to pay the basic costs of home teaching but to provide ICT training for home teachers and teachers in hospitals, it is not quite as fundamental as it might appear. In any case, there is only £1 million available for that purpose.

On Question, Motion agreed to.