In 1994 Britain was a very different country. John Major was in power and had just launched his “back to basics” campaign, 18 million people tuned in every week to watch Noel’s House Party on the BBC, and the internet was still in its infancy — Amazon was created that year but Facebook was still another ten years away.
Over the next three decades so much has changed but one British institution that was created that year is still with us today: the National Lottery.
Thirty years ago next week the first draw was made live on TV, drawing in a record 22 million viewers — a figure only beaten that year by Torvill and Dean’s bronze medal performance at the Lillehammer Winter Olympics.
Since then the lottery has created more than 7,200 millionaires and donated more than £49 billion to good causes.
While the main weekly draw no longer has the profile of the past — and is not even shown on TV — about six million people still buy a ticket each week.
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Major, who introduced the lottery during his premiership, said the money raised had indelibly changed Britain for the better.
In an article for The Times he writes: “Its impact can be seen far and wide: in the exceptional performance of the England women’s football team; amongst Olympians and Paralympians, in the creation and preservation of the UK’s most treasured landmarks, in the richness of our arts and creative industries, and in the thousands of local community projects that support a healthy, enriched way of life for so many.”
However, the last 30 years have not all been plain sailing for the lottery. It has come under fire for changes to the price and format of the game, encouraging gambling, and wasting money on “wacky, woke and wasteful projects”.
One of the most controversial moments came in 2013 when Camelot, which ran the lottery at the time, doubled the price of a ticket to £2. The public’s anger only intensified when it emerged soon afterwards that the move triggered large bonuses for senior managers at the company.
Two years later Camelot was under fire again, this time for increasing the amount of numbers in the draw, from 49 to 59, sending the chance of winning the jackpot from 14 million to one to 45 million to one. Or put another way, it went from being about as likely as dying in a plane crash to surviving a plane crash.
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The result was fewer winners, but crucially for Camelot, more rollovers, increasing the jackpot and raising ticket sales. The operator benefits from higher ticket sales because it receives a fixed 4 per cent of revenues.
Just over half of the rest of the money goes to the prize fund while just under a quarter is given to good causes. Of the remaining cash, 12 per cent goes to the government in duty and 4 per cent to retailers as commission.
Another of the longstanding criticisms of the lottery is that it is a “tax on the poor”. Research suggests that people on lower incomes play more frequently and spend more on the games than wealthier Britons. Lower-income households are also significantly more likely to play scratchcards, which are considered more dangerous than the weekly draws.
Matt Zarb-Cousin, the director of the Clean Up Gambling campaign, said: “Scratchcards carry a much higher risk of addiction than the lottery, and only £1 in every £10 spent on them goes to good causes, compared with £3 for draw-based games.”
The lottery has also come under scrutiny for the way it has been run, most notably in 2019, when Edward Putman, a convicted rapist, conspired with a Camelot insider to create a fake ticket to claim an outstanding £2.5 million jackpot. He was eventually caught and the Gambling Commission fined the company £3 million for failing to stop the fraud.
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Controversy also dogged the transfer of the operating licence earlier this year from Camelot to Allwyn, a company owned by Karel Komarek, a Czech billionaire with a colourful history.
Komarek has been the subject of articles on his alleged involvement in questionable activities, including one scandal described in court as being akin to a James Bond plot. However, sources close to the tycoon have always dismissed such accusations as merely being part of a campaign to discredit him.
The tycoon’s commercial links with the Russian energy giant, Gazprom, also led some to say he should not have been allowed to take over such a key part of Britain’s cultural heritage. However, Komarek has strongly condemned President Putin’s invasion of Ukraine and pledged to divest his company from Russian assets.
Despite the many controversies, no one can argue that the National Lottery has supported hundreds of thousands of good causes over the past 30 years.
As well as funding cultural landmarks such as Sir Antony Gormley’s Angel of the North and The Globe theatre, it has helped hundreds of Olympians win more than 1,000 medals. It has also funded British film-makers, helping create blockbusters such as Bend it Like Beckham and The King’s Speech.
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The National Lottery is also responsible for supporting thousands of smaller, community-based projects. One of those is Cook for Good, a community organisation that has received more than £38,000 to help tackle food insecurity, social isolation, and barriers to work on a deprived housing estate in Islington, north London.
Karen Mattison, the co-founder of the project, said the lottery’s Awards for All programme, which offers start-up funding for community projects, was crucial.
“I always wanted Cook for Good to be financially sustainable, and within three years, we’re now at 80 per cent of our own earned income,” she said. “But we could never have achieved that without the lottery.”
However, not everything the lottery funds has been met with equal enthusiasm.
Last year the National Lottery Heritage Fund, which is one the 12 distributors of lottery cash, was criticised for spending £250,000 on an initiative that celebrated the 1981 Brixton riots, an incident which resulted in 279 police being injured.
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The National Lottery Community Fund, another of the 12 distributors, has also been criticised for making a grant of £500,000 to Mermaids, the transgender charity that is now under investigation by the Charity Commission.
However, such controversies have not stopped 30 million Britons from buying a ticket each year. And some — albeit an infinitesimally small proportion — get seriously lucky. One of them is Ceri Roscoe-Roberts, a nurse from Llanberis in north Wales, who won £1 million on the EuroMillions draw in November last year.
The 43-year-old said she woke on the morning of the draw with a “strange feeling” that she had to buy a ticket. “It was completely out of the ordinary because I don’t play all the time,” she said.
The next morning, when she checked her ticket, she found she had won.
“It was unbelievable,” she said, “I didn’t believe it. I checked it four or five times, and then woke my husband and said, ‘I think we’ve won’, and he was checking it on his phone as well. It was just a very surreal moment but very exciting at the same time.”
The mother of five said the money had transformed her life.
“We’ve gone from bringing up the children in a small terraced house, a two-up, two-down, and struggling to make ends meet to living in a stunning location where I used to come as a child every weekend,” she said.
A big lottery win does not always work out so perfectly. Tales abound of winners’ lives spiralling out of control after the money lands.
Probably the most famous is Michael Carroll, also known as the “lotto lout”. The 19-year-old binman won more than £9.7 million in 2002 but after a wild few years of drugs, parties and fast cars, which culminated in him receiving an antisocial behaviour order and ending up in jail for affray, he had lost or given away most of his fortune.
By 2010 he returned to his old job collecting rubbish, having published an autobiography called Careful What You Wish For.
Others have claimed that winning ruined their lives. Roger Robar, who won £6 million in 1996, said that his life became a “suffocating hell” after he hit the jackpot.
The chef said he was inundated with requests for help and ended up giving away £1.5 million to strangers, a generosity that ruined his marriage. He later fled to France, saying that if he had a choice between winning the lottery and still being a chef on £250 a week, he would choose to stay a chef. “I was so much happier then,” he said.
Whether the lottery will last another 30 years, and what form it will take if it does, remains to be seen. However, Andria Vidler, the chief executive of Allwyn, predicts a bright future.
He said: “We’re on a mission to get our National Lottery growing and thriving again. Having already committed a £350 million investment, we’re injecting innovation across our games, getting to know our players, developing new games that excite them — creating more winners and ensuring we can fulfil the ambition to double the money for good causes over the course of the licence. I’m really confident this can be the best decade yet for the National Lottery.”
The National Lottery has made us all winners
Thirty years ago, I bought one of the very first National Lottery tickets at Victoria Station, and knew we were at the start of an extraordinary journey (Sir John Major writes).
That day, I was one of 20 million people who queued up for a chance to win the first ever draw. All of them — and every player since — has contributed indelibly to changing the landscape and culture of the UK for the better.
Despite initial scepticism from some quarters, I was convinced that the National Lottery promised a future rich with purpose and potential — a promise that has been fulfilled beyond anything I could have imagined 30 years ago.
Today, its impact can be seen far and wide: in the exceptional performance of the England women’s football team, amongst Olympians and Paralympians, in the creation and preservation of the UK’s most treasured landmarks, in the richness of our arts and creative industries, and in the thousands of local community projects that support a healthy, enriched way of life for so many.
Thus far, over £49 billion has been distributed by the National Lottery since its inception, a staggering figure that begs the question: what would our society look like without it? We named it the National Lottery because it serves the entire nation — and its effects are as widespread as they are powerful.
Without it, we may have never known or seen such things as the Angel of the North, the Globe theatre, the Eden Project — or the triumphs of our Olympic and Paralympic champions.
The very first grant awarded was to the Morecambe Brass Band — a modest beginning, but one that was fitting for an institution that is as committed to raising money for local community facilities as it is projects of national significance.
The National Lottery’s influence can be felt in towns and villages in every corner of the UK, supporting initiatives from hairdressing services for the homeless, to campaigns like This Girl Can and Parkrun. It funds Bafta-winning films that have put British actors and directors on the global stage. Its impact is felt in the provision of suits for job seekers in the West Midlands, free holidays for families grappling with cancer in Yorkshire, and the conservation of the UK’s water vole population.
Today, as with all institutions, the National Lottery must evolve to keep pace with changing audience behaviours. Born in an analogue age, it now faces the challenge of transitioning into the digital era – a transformation that we couldn’t imagine back in 1994, nor even at the start of the third licence. The fourth licence, under the stewardship of Allwyn, is setting out to ensure that the National Lottery remains relevant and robust for the future.
Anyone can be a winner — there is always that hope. But win or no win, everyone can take pride and pleasure in seeing the proceeds of the Lottery continue to promote good causes in every corner of the UK.
As we look ahead to the future, I am full of optimism about how much more the National Lottery will contribute to our national life and wellbeing. For the past 30 years, “it could be you” has been all of us, and all our lives are the richer for it.
Sir John Major was prime minister from 1990 to 1997
