I am delighted to have won the Speaker's lottery and to have secured the debate today on the national lottery. It will be the last Adjournment debate that I have in the House, and I am particularly pleased to have won it, because today is the birthday of my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for National Heritage, who has done so much to advance the cause of the national lottery.

It was Santayana who said that there is no cure for birth and death save to enjoy the interval. One of the remarkable things about the national lottery legislation is that it has the specific purpose of increasing our enjoyment of life. Playing the lottery, we can all become—for a few seconds—dream millionaires. At that moment just before 8 o'clock when the balls are turning in that great wheel and before the first one comes out, we can all think about swimming pools, jacuzzis and holidays in the Caribbean. Perhaps just a few minutes later, after the bonus ball has come out, we are back to reality again—worrying about supper, the children, the mortgage, and so on—but for those few seconds we have had the thrill of a taste of champagne, perhaps, and that adds to the sparkle of life for most families in Britain today.

As we all know, the lottery has a very serious purpose as well: to raise money for good causes, which previously received little or nothing from the public sector. In that regard, it has been a howling success. There are no other words for it. It has greatly exceeded expectations. When I was Minister for the Arts and first pressed for the lottery, we talked about a possible turnover of £2 billion to £3 billion a year. In fact that has rapidly gone up to £5 billion or £6 billion a year.

It is commonplace to think of ourselves as a nation of grumblers. I often think that the Germans are worriers, that the French are optimists and that we love to carp and grumble, but it is impossible, other than on a few small specifics, to grumble about the lottery. It is transforming the face of Britain. Galleries, museums, libraries, sports tracks, football grounds, forests, churches, village halls are all being rebuilt, renewed, restored. So far, £3 billion has been committed to more than 19,000 projects.

It is fair to say that what the Medicis did for Florence and Napoleon did for Paris, the lottery is doing for Great Britain. I pay particular tribute to my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for National Heritage and to my right hon. Friend the Member for the City of London and Westminster, South (Mr. Brooke) for their tremendous commitment to getting the lottery on the road and ensuring its success.

It was not my intention today just to follow John Betjeman's words:

• "Sing on, with hymns uproarious,
• Ye humble and aloof,
• Look up! and oh how glorious
• He has restored the roof!"

It was my intention to talk rather more about the future of the national lottery and what might—and should—happen to it in the next five years, extending through the millennium.

In that time, inevitably, funding will largely move away from buildings and capital projects to current expenditure—particularly, for example, helping with the training and tuition fees of talented individuals: artists, sportsmen, dancers, potential Albert Finneys and Margot Fonteyns. The Arts Council's announcement last week that it would make lottery money available short term for 4,000 students in drama and dance who will start their courses in autumn 1997–98 was clearly part and parcel of that new development, that new dedication of lottery money.

I wholeheartedly applaud all of that. That is the right direction in which grant-giving bodies have to move, but I see dangers in it, the first of which—I am sure that my hon. Friend the Minister will not object to my saying this—is the increasing likelihood, as the lottery gets a little older and we become more accustomed to it, of Ministers tending, subtly and delicately, to try to override the grant-giving bodies and to back their own pet projects. It follows that the principle of additionality may be put at risk.

The House will remember that it was very much on the principle of additionality that the lottery legislation went through the House—that money raised by the lottery should be additional to the Treasury's commitment to public expenditure, for example, to the Arts Council. Preserving that principle is of absolute importance to the lottery, just as it is in the minds of those who buy their tickets every week: it is the basic principle on which the lottery was started.

Let us consider the terrible possibility—the unlikely possibility—of Labour winning the next election. We have already been threatened with a windfall tax, and I gather that there is a possibility that the windfall tax might be required to raise not £3 billion but as much as £10 billion. The first windfall that would be easily available to a Labour Secretary of State for National Heritage would, of course, be the £1.5 billion that goes to good causes: it would be all too easy to try to grab that and push it into a favourite project.