Lottery grant directors' pounds 1.4m

REBECCA FOWLER

The executives responsible for giving National Lottery grants to good causes will present the Government with a bill of pounds 1.4m for their first year of service.

The salaries of the chairmen and directors of the five lottery boards, representing charities, arts, heritage, sport and the millennium, were made public yesterday, amid growing calls for the running of the lottery to be more accountable.

But Dr Jack Cunningham, Labour's National Heritage spokesman said the lottery executives' salaries were very reasonable, compared to the lavish earnings of the directors of Camelot, the privately run operator of the lottery.

The highest paid chief executives of lottery boards are Tim Hornsby, who oversees charities grants, and Jennifer Page, head of the Millennium Commission, both on pounds 80,000 a year. The National Lottery director of the Arts Council is paid pounds 45,000, and the chief executive of the Sports Council is on pounds 60,000. By comparison, Camelot awarded Tim Holley, its chief executive, a basic salary of pounds 333,000 including a 50 per cent bonus payment. Under two further types of bonus payment Mr Holley could earn up to pounds 696,000 in the future.

"It is interesting to compare the salaries of senior officials on lottery boards to the hundreds of thousands of pounds paid to each of Camelot's directors, who are running a private enterprise monopoly," said Dr Cunningham.

"Camelot is not a normal company; it has a licence to print money and in the next few years its directors will be paid bonuses of up to 140 per cent of their annual salary, bringing their salaries to over pounds 500,000. I do not believe this, nor the excessive profits of Camelot as a whole, is the right way to run the nation's lottery."

The boards are responsible for distributing the pounds 1.2bn already raised by the lottery for good causes. The boards said their salaries were typical of those awarded to civil servants. "These salaries are set by the Government and they are civil servant grades," a spokesman for the Sports Council said.