How The National Lottery boosts the UK's love of 'giving'
9th Ionawr 2025
[Standfirst]
The Great British public loves to give. It’s a point of national pride dating back to at least the Victorian era’s so-called ‘do-gooders,’ and the 19th
Century rise of charities. Polls in 2024 suggest that giving is alive and well (unsurprising with the cost of living among other crises). The international crowdfunding site GoFundMe has ranked the UK as the 2nd most generous among nations. Meanwhile, the NHS says giving makes us happier
and other sources in science suggest that generosity makes us live healthier and longer.
December puts all of this into clear focus. The gifting and goodwill of Christmas, among other religious festivities, is the grand finale of a month of giving. Nowadays, December begins with “Giving Tuesday”, within “Giving Week”, an annual charity push raising about £20m each time. A key player here is BigGive’s Christmas Challenge using a match-funding model to double funds: raising nearly £45m in 2024.
Lottery grants are not ‘given’
Grant funding from the dozen National Lottery distributors (i.e. Arts Councils of each home nation, UK Sport, BFI, and more) is different from freely given donation. The money is awarded, typically, by an application process and via the scrutiny of applicants including bank and legal checks.
Volunteering
About £1.5Bn has boosted voluntary organisations and/or projects led by volunteers, specifically, since 1994. And a much larger amount (over £10Bn) has gone to charities and community organisations with at least some level of volunteering or where volunteering is one part of project work.
That vast scale (billions) is hard to fathom but here’s one quick reckoning from the key distributor of funds in this regard, The National Lottery Community Fund [NLCF]. In 2021, it was estimated that nearly two million volunteers had been backed by NLCF funding to charities and community organisations (2018-2021) and that those volunteers had “contributed £4Bn to the economy over the past three years”.
Food banks
We can cast more of a spotlight on something measured by a smaller scale (thousands) that’s hugely significant when we think about giving. Food banks have, sadly, become a vital lifeline for people across the UK over the past decade.