The government has not repaid any of the £425m it owes to the National Lottery Community Fund, 15 years after borrowing the cash to help fund the London Olympics, documents show.
Third Sector has learned that asset sales from the former Olympic Park in Stratford, which will be used to reimburse the NLCF, have not yet raised enough money to trigger repayments.
The government had previously pledged that loan repayments would begin “in the early to mid-2020s” but, in a further sign of delays, that timetable was dropped from the NLCF’s most recent financial statements.
The training and publishing charity the Directory of Social Change, which has campaigned on the issue for several years, described the ongoing delays as “outrageous”.
In 2007, the government decided to divert £675m raised through lottery sales to help cover the growing costs of the 2012 London Olympics.
This included £425m which would otherwise have been distributed to charities by the NLCF, then called the Big Lottery Fund.
A later agreement, struck between the government and the Greater London Authority on behalf of the Mayor of London, stated that the loan would be repaid using net proceeds from the sale of assets on the Olympics site.
Under that agreement, the first £223m from sales would go to the GLA, with proceeds after that sent to the government to organise repayment to the NLCF.
The London Legacy Development Corporation, which now manages the former Olympic site, said in response to a request under the Freedom of Information Act made by Third Sector that assets sales relevant to the agreement were worth £167m so far, less than the total needed to start releasing funds to the NLCF.
As a result, all proceeds to date had been “retained by the GLA or LLDC”, the response said.
In the meantime, the NLCF has changed the way it refers to the loan in its public accounts.
The funder’s accounts each year between 2018/19 and 2020/21 said “the [government] department estimates the first payments to National Lottery distributors will be received in the early to mid-2020s”, but the most recent accounts, for 2021/22, do not mention any timetable and instead say: “We continue to engage with the GLA on forecasts for land sales on the Olympic Park.”
The NLCF declined to comment on the change and referred all queries to the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport.
DCMS confirmed the details of the 2012 agreement but did not answer questions about why the repayment timetable had been removed from the accounts, even though Third Sector understands that government officials are responsible for writing this section of NLCF’s financial filings.
Ben Wittenberg, director of development and delivery at the DSC, said: “It is outrageous that charities are still waiting for this money to be returned.
“It shouldn’t have been taken in the first place, wasn’t even needed in the end, and the process for it being paid back has been lacking in any clarity, urgency or compassion from successive governments.
“The current cost-of-living crisis is already hitting charities, and for money that should be helping them to survive and support their communities to be tied up in assets that will never benefit them just isn’t right.”