It’s an £80bn contract. Yet no one is really talking about the competition underway (all the bids have been filed) for the fourth licence of the National Lottery. Barely any independent retailers even know it’s up for grabs, for example, let alone the stakes involved.
That’s because the Gambling Commission has made the process a secret. No one is allowed to talk about the details of their bids: what the bid is; why it might be better than Camelot’s. Even though, for any publicly listed partners, this is an announceable event. As an applicant you don’t even need to declare your interest.
The Gambling Commission has form in this regard. In its previous guise, as the Office of the National Lottery (OFLOT), its decision to award the original lottery contract back in 1994 was shrouded in secrecy. Popular sentiment had suggested Richard Branson’s promise to run the lottery at breakeven would prevail. Instead the state-franchised lottery was awarded to the Camelot consortium, who went on to sell it to a Canadian pension fund a year after winning the third licence.
The bids for the second and third licences were even more obscure, if they were even bids at all, with so-called rivals seemingly acting as stalking horses to keep Camelot honest.
Yet change is coming. The assimilation of the National Lottery Commission into the Gambling Commission already speaks to a change of emphasis. Instead of standing in isolation, it recognises that taking part in the lottery is still a form of gambling, even if money goes to good causes.
And with the lottery’s share of the market, at just 22%, the smallest of any developed country in the world – and contributing just £3.5bn in so-called gross gambling yield, vs the £5.5bn coming from faster-growing online gambling operators – the word on the street is that this is the most ‘open’ contest ever (at least in terms of being a competition), recognising that if punters are going to gamble, it’s better for the state-run lottery to have the largest share of the prize. That’s a licence for the lottery to get more creative – and go more digital. If any bidder can do all that while keeping retailers on side, it could be the winning ticket.
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