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Ensuring a fair Lottery for the nation
£28 billion for good causes
£40 billion in prizes

Public consultation

The National Lottery is an institution in the UK; it is something that is important to people, whether they play or not. And that’s why we wanted to give everyone an opportunity to have their say on the Lottery of the future.
We launched our public consultation on 14 February 2006 and it closed on 31 May 2006. It was a questionnaire, which could be accessed online via our website, www.natlotcomm.gov.uk, or by hard copy on request. The questionnaire was not intended to solicit views on the performance of the operator, but to gain an insight into which aspects of the National Lottery are important to people, and how they would like it to be run in future

We asked people:

Which aspects of National Lottery games are most important to them, is it the size of the jackpots, for example, or the fact that the Lotto draws are televised?How important they believe different aspects of the Lottery are in regard to its future operation. For example, how important is the use of the latest technology, or the fact that a proportion of ticket sales goes to good causes?Can people identify aspects that they would like to see change in the future?Are people aware that the Licence competition is happening, and do they have sufficient information?h4. Key findings from the questionnaire

Issues of accessibility, such as how easy it is to buy tickets and the ease with which players can check Lottery results, were seen by the majority of respondents to be important factors in the National Lottery.There was a general consensus that the integrity of the Lottery and player protection were important issues.The majority of respondents valued the fact that a proportion of ticket sales goes to good causes. It was also found that there was a desire for information about the good causes funded to be publicly available.Opinion was more divided on issues of the size of jackpots, game variety, TV and technology.When asked about the Licence competition, almost half of respondents declared themselves to be uninterested in the process itself, although two thirds thought they could easily obtain information about the competition of they were interested.p. We are indebted to the people who engaged with us, and their views have been useful for those leading the design of the competition process.

It should be noted that as with all public consultation, respondents to our questionnaire are self-selected and are therefore not representative either of Lottery players or the UK population in general.

A summary of the results is available to download as a PDF document on the left-hand side of this page.

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