How Good Causes Benefit From The UK Lottery Draw

The entries will close for the UK National Lottery Awards very soon. The awards recognise the initiatives financed from the lottery funds and highlight that feature of the UK lottery draw that is so easily overlooked. Each week after the lottery draw, players either celebrate their success or complain about their failure. Yet every week there are other winners: the funds from the draw benefit various charities and good causes.

Television personality Sally Lindsey and a group of ladies from the Women’s Royal Voluntary service promoted the awards at the London Transport Museum. The choice of venue was deliberate, as both the WRVS and the museum have received funds from the British national lottery draw.

In the Welsh county of Pembrokeshire, St Davids cathedral had originally been constructed in 1181 on the site of an existing building. In its history, the church has experienced an earthquake, attacks from marauding soldiers and continual erosion from the elements. It has been a long struggle for survival. Recently, however, the situation has been helped a little following a grant from the National Lottery, which enabled the rebuilding of the north porch and the south cloister.

An ITV network television programme, The Peoples Millions, also distributes lottery funds. For example, Rowan Gate Primary School in Northamptonshire successfully applied to the programme for £50 000 to improve the school’s physiotherapy pool and open access to the pool for disabled children.

A more extensive initiative that has benefited from the UK lottery draw fund is a series of projects created to recognise the role servicemen played in the Second World War. One part of this, The Heroes Return, gave £17 million to enable veterans of the war to return to the sites of their campaigns. 58 veterans of the Royal Navy used this to return to Penang and Singapore.


Another part of the same scheme was the Their Past Your Future project which gave school children the chance to study the war and to actually meet the veterans. The Home Front Recall initiative also donated grants ranging from £500 to £20 000 to schemes commemorating the people and events of the Second World War.

The lottery was launched in 1994 and, since that time, around £25 million a week has been raised for charities. This means that a total of £24 billion has been raised to date.

It is clear, therefore, that in it’s 15 year life, the UK lottery draw has made a great impact on a wide section of British society. In particular, 28 per cent of the grants have been received by the most deprived areas of British society with tremendous results.

The lottery can too easily be seen purely in terms of winning and losing of money and yet there is no doubt it has effects that are far more positive.


To find out more about the lotteries, please visit UK lottery draw.