November news update

Welcome to the National Lottery Commission’s latest news update. There have been some important developments for us over the last few weeks. If you would like more information on anything covered in the update or to add or remove someone from our distribution list, contact us at info@natlotcomm.gov.uk.

Merger with the Gambling Commission

The Cabinet Office confirmed on 24 September that the National Lottery Commission and the Gambling Commission will be merged as part of the government’s review of Public Bodies. We are taking a proactive approach to working with the Gambling Commission to ensure that this process goes as smoothly as possible. Our primary concern during the process will be to ensure that the long term interests of the National Lottery, its players, and the £25 million they raise for good causes each week are safeguarded.

Until the merger takes place, we will continue to effectively fulfil our responsibilities to regulate the National Lottery and will not let the merger distract us from carrying out the important work that we do.

Change to rules on overseas play of National Lottery games

We have been working with Camelot on the issue of players using the National Lottery website to play games whilst overseas. During this work it has become apparent that in a majority of other countries it is not legal to play UK National Lottery games online. Tickets bought by players located in a country where it is illegal to play the UK National Lottery online are not valid, and Camelot would not be able to pay out if these tickets won a prize.

In order to make this situation clearer for players, we asked Camelot to change the rules to make it against the rules to play National Lottery games online when outside of the UK or Isle of Man. The new rules come into effect on 13 December, and make plain that you must be physically located in the UK or Isle of Man to play National Lottery games online, or make any changes to your online account. More information is available on our website.

We want to make sure that members of the armed forces serving overseas are given the same chance to enjoy National Lottery games as anyone else. We are working on this issue to find what more can be done to enable the armed forces to participate in a way that does not break the laws of other countries.

Being transparent

The government has launched a public sector-wide transparency initiative with the aim of enabling the public to see how public money is spent and hold the government to account for it. We fully support this initiative and recognise that it is important that public bodies should conduct themselves a way that is open and transparent. As part of this initiative, we have published details of senior staff salaries, organisational structure diagrams and our expenditure over £500.

We have also been working to make sure that we are open about the way we work and make decisions. As a result we have started to publish minutes from the Commission meetings and our responses to FOI requests. A new section on our website has been created to house all this information: www.natlotcomm.gov.uk/transparency.

Update on Camelot proposal to offer Commercial Services

In July we made a provisional decision not to grant consent to Camelot’s proposal to offer commercial services such as bill payments and mobile top-ups through National Lottery terminals. In order to be fair to all interested parties, we allowed them until 20 October to make representations to us about the decision. Now that we have received all of the final representations we will consider them and what further work we will need to undertake. Once this is completed we will be able to make available a timetable for a final decision. More information is available on our website.