I am pleased to bring to the chamber this members’ business debate on the pressing need for the United Kingdom Government to lift the £50 million cap on charity lottery sales. I thank Scottish National Party, Conservative and Labour members who have supported my motion to enable the debate to take place.

Although lotteries policy is reserved, the issue impacts greatly on charity policy, which is of course devolved, and on many charities that are based in Scotland. Despite their existing to fund charities and good causes rather than to make private profit, charity lotteries are the only type of gambling or fundraising that have a cap on their sales. To illustrate the absurdity of the situation, figures that have been released by the Gambling Commission show that the total revenue to United Kingdom gambling firms in the past financial year was a staggering £10.9 billion, excluding reported lotteries.

It is now virtually impossible to attend or watch a football match without being bombarded by every conceivable type of gambling advert. According to the University of Glasgow researcher Dr Robin Ireland, a single English Premier League game between Newcastle Football Club and Wolverhampton Wanderers Football Club, both of which have gambling sponsors, resulted in 716 gambling exposures over the course of the game.

As members of the Scottish Parliament, the vast majority of us have seen first hand how devastating problem gambling can be for individuals, their families and, indeed, whole communities. Online betting, gaming machines and betting shops are all commonly cited sources of debt and despair for problem gamblers.

Charity lotteries are not, but as things stand under the UK Gambling Act 2005, only charity lotteries are the subject of an annual cap on sales. The cap serves no purpose other than to place an artificial ceiling on an important fundraising stream for charities and good causes that are doing phenomenal work in, for example, my Cunninghame North constituency, across Scotland and, indeed, across England, Wales and Northern Ireland.

The reason why the charity lottery sales limit exists at all is unclear. The only stakeholder opposition to raising the limit came from Camelot, which until today held the licence to run the national lottery. The company’s opposition came from a desire to diminish competition with the national lottery. However, that notion has been thoroughly debunked. Evidence has consistently shown that charity lotteries complement, rather than compete with, the unique position of the national lottery.

A 2022 report by the UK Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee into the future of the national lottery founder stated:

“society lotteries play a different role from the National Lottery and do not pose a threat to the National Lottery’s charitable giving.”

I know that the charity lottery sector has been struggling with the issue for many years now, so it is heartening to have cross-party support across the Scottish Parliament for this common-sense move to free up additional charity funding for good causes, at no cost to the taxpayer. I hope that today’s debate will send to Westminster a strong message about the long-overdue need for action.

On a UK-wide basis, charity lotteries generate more than £420 million per annum for charities and good causes of all sizes, and that amount is growing each year. The largest and best-selling operator is, of course, Scotland’s own People’s Postcode Lottery, which is a true Scottish fundraising success story. To date, its players have raised more than £1.2 billion for good causes, which is a scarcely believable number. Players now raise more than £18 million per month for good causes across Britain. From its central Edinburgh headquarters, it employs more than 400 people, two of whom—Nick Cook and Andrew Murray—join us in the public gallery. I thank the People’s Postcode Lottery for its debate briefing.

Grass-roots constituency projects and organisations such as the Arran Youth Foundations school holiday programme and Largs First Responders have received more than a quarter of a million pounds of People’s Postcode Lottery funding. Only last week, four winning tickets in a Saltcoats neighbourhood resulted in six charities—The Ayrshire Community Trust, Input SCIO, the Ayrshire branch of Breastfeeding Network, the Trussell Trust, Ayrshire Children’s Services CIC and the North Ayrshire Forum on Disability—receiving five-figure sums for local projects.

In respect of large national charities, Scotland-based organisations such as Children First, Maggie’s and the Ellen MacArthur Cancer Trust, which operates out of Largs, are in receipt of long-term multimillion-pound annual funding awards. It is clear that charity lotteries are an integral part of the charitable fundraising mix in communities up and down the country. The unrestricted nature of the funding only increases its importance.

However, People’s Postcode Lottery has raised concerns about the current restrictive limit and how it is impacting on its players’ charitable giving. As things stand, four of the 20 trusts that are administered by People’s Postcode Lottery have had to take action to ensure that they do not breach the £50 million annual sales cap—a figure that does not rise with inflation. That means that those trusts will not be able to increase the amount of funds that they give to the good causes that they support, even if ticket sales continue to increase.

Ten postcode trusts are set to be within 3 per cent of the legal sales limit in 2024, which means a larger funding gap and a growing number of charities being affected. The current £50 million annual sales cap that came into effect in July 2020 is well short of the £100 million that was identified as the UK Government’s preferred option in its 2018 consultation, towards which, it has since stated, it remains sympathetic. Due to high inflation and the cost of living crisis that we are experiencing that is, in effect, a year-on-year real-terms funding cut for those charities. Today, £50 million represents a 17.4 per cent decrease in real terms from when the cap was lifted in 2020.

People’s Postcode Lottery has highlighted the charities that are likely to be affected by annual sales caps, as well as the individual amount that they are projected to lose over the next five years—2024 through 2028—without the removal of, or significant reforms to, the annual sales limit. I will not mention all the dozens and dozens of charities on People’s Postcode Lottery’s website, but I will mention some. Dogs Trust is projected to lose £4.9 million; British Red Cross, £4.9 million; Save the Children, £4.5 million; Breast Cancer Now, £3.6 million; the Royal National Institute of Blind People, £3.2 million; Action Against Hunger £1.6 million; and Mary’s Meals, £1.3 million. At the top of the tree is Amnesty International, which will lose out on £5.7 million.

The problem will only grow in the years to come, unless the cap is raised or, better still, abolished. It is also worth pointing out that in each of the 20 postcode trusts are individual Scottish charities in their own right that are registered with the Office of the Scottish Charity Regulator, which has itself backed reform in the area. Over the next five years, 100 supported charities will lose an estimated £175 million or more in extra funding due to the lottery cap. It is frankly disgraceful and astonishing that good causes that are providing services to some of society’s most vulnerable people will lose out on essential funding due to an outdated and nonsensical regulation.

The UK Government has a real chance to make a difference to charities by removing the charity lottery annual sales limit, and it should act now. The Scottish Government and MPs across the board—including my wife, Patricia Gibson MP, who raised the matter last year and again, most recently, in the House of Commons on 11 January—back removal of the limit, as part of an overall strategy to ensure that we help the charity sector in Scotland to thrive.

I also know that its removal has received support across this Parliament. Successive cabinet secretaries for social justice have lobbied the Department for Culture, Media and Sport to ask the secretary of state to remove the annual sales limit as a matter of urgency. It is astonishing that it has not happened already, and I am sure that the minister will touch on that in her remarks.

If the Scottish Government had the powers, it could and would remove the limit, but, as things stand, it does not. I thank colleagues across the chamber for taking the time to debate and support this important issue, and I hope that the UK Government takes note of the strength of cross-party support in Scotland’s Parliament for the common-sense changes. I urge the UK Government to act to remove the charity lottery fundraising cap without delay. It will cost the taxpayer nothing and will be appreciated across the board.