Series details: CRDA/39

The Lottery Awards Database is a system that provides information about awards to good causes made with money raised by the National Lottery. It captures information about grants awarded by the various lottery Distributing Bodies from data supplied to the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) by the Distributing Bodies. The awards database was designed to compile reports for both houses of Parliament on lottery grants awarded, and also to generate letters to MPs informing them about lottery awards made in their constituencies, although this function of the database is not widely used. The database is maintained as a central source of information that can be interrogated in response to ad-hoc queries about lottery awards. The facility for visitors to the DCMS web site to carry out remote searches of the database was also part of the functionality of the system.1

The UK's National Lottery is among the largest of its kind in the world. From its launch on 14 November 1994 to the end of June 2006 it had achieved nearly £57 billion in ticket sales. By September 2006, £19 billion had been raised by the Lottery for the good causes and over 240,000 grants had been made.2

For every pound spent on lottery tickets approximately 28 pence goes directly to the good causes via the National Lottery Distribution Fund (NLDF). Camelot (the company that operates the Lottery on behalf of the National Lottery Commission) also pays the value of all unclaimed prizes for which the claim period has expired to the NLDF. The good causes are: the arts, charities and voluntary groups, heritage, health, education, the environment and sports. The responsibility for distributing proceeds from the Lottery rests with the lottery funding bodies each of which provides data from its own systems to update the DCMS lottery database. They make their funding decisions independently of government but within a framework of Government policy directions. In 2006 there were 14 lottery funders: the four national Arts Councils, the four national Sports Councils, UK Sport, the Heritage Lottery Fund, the UK Film Council, Scottish Screen, Awards for All, the Big Lottery Fund and NESTA (the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts). These last three funding bodies have been established since the transfer of the 2001 snapshot of the DCMS lottery dataset. In 2001 funds were also distributed by the Community Fund (also known as the National Lottery Charities Board), the Millennium Commission and the New Opportunities Fund. National Lottery funding will also contribute up to £1.5 billion towards the costs of staging the 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games in London.3

The responsibility for managing the Lottery Awards Database lies with the National Lotteries Division of DCMS. The awards data contained within the database is supplied to DCMS by the 15 distributing bodies. For further information on DCMS see the Culture Departments Administrative History.

NDAD currently holds two datasets derived from the Lottery Awards Database. The first dataset is a snapshot of the system taken in March 2001 which includes details of successful awards made between February 1995 and March 2001. It also contains information on failed applications between January 1995 and March 1997. After this date the Distributing Bodies ceased supplying information on failed applications to DCMS. A second snapshot of the system was transferred to NDAD in July 2006 containing details of successful awards up to and including 2 September 2006.

The AWAWDS table, covering successful awards contains the majority of the data input to the database. In the dataset transferred to NDAD in March 2001 the table contained details of more than 83,000 lottery awards. In the 2006 snapshot the number of awards had increased to more than 250,000. The data in this table includes the following details:

• Unique identifiers for the award, distributing body and distributing body sector. The distributing body sector is a sub classification of the distributing body (for example, in the case of an award made by Sport England, the particular sport benefiting from the award would be the distributing body sector).
• Details of the organisation receiving the award, including the name and address and an indication of whether or not it holds charitable status.
• Information about the project, including a short description, the amount awarded, the total cost of the project, the date of the award, the project completion date and the status of the award (ie successful, completed, stopped or withdrawn).
• Location details used as part of the various reporting functions within the database. These include the electoral ward, local authority, county, UK and European Parliamentary constituencies and UK region.

In addition to the awards data the database also contains data relating to UK Members of Parliament. This is supplied to DCMS by a private company, QAS Ltd on a quarterly basis. Data supplied by QAS is used to validate the postcodes of organisations receiving lottery awards. These are then used to derive values for those fields in the AWAWDS table covering location; for example county, local authority area and region. Changes to the data that are made as a result of data supplied by QAS are recorded separately in the AWREDERIVE table.

Further transfers of data from the Lottery Awards Database are expected.

The Lottery Awards Database and related dataset documentation are public records under the Public Records Acts 1958 and 1967. The National Archives has assigned the dataset and documents the reference PF 1.

Some of the tables and fields in the Lottery Awards Database are subject to access restrictions. See the dataset catalogues for further details (Links to dataset catalogues). Dataset documentation is open to users of NDAD without restriction.

Data from the Lottery Awards Database and its related dataset documentation are subject to Crown Copyright. Copies may be made for private study and research purposes only.

The Lottery Awards Database contains information about organisations that have applied to the Lottery Distributing Bodies for funding and does not contain information on individuals. It is not, therefore, subject to registration under the Data Protection Act.

The language of the materials is English.

A number of items of dataset documentation have been transferred to NDAD. Further details are available in the Dataset Documentation Catalogue.

When the dataset was transferred to NDAD in 2001, the Lottery Awards Database was available to users in DCMS via networked PCs linked to a server (in September 2002, this was a Compaq Proliant 2500).

When the second dataset was transferred in 2006, the system ran on a Windows 2003 server, accessed from workstations running under the Windows XP operating system.

The Lottery Awards Database runs (2002) under Novell Network 5.

The Lottery Awards Database was developed as a client server application using Borland Delphi. Reports were written using the Quick Report component of Delphi. All of the 'core' data is held in an Oracle database. The original specification for the database4 indicates that the system was developed using an Oracle 7 database. The system is currently (2006) held in an Oracle 9.2 database. In 2002 when NDAD received the first transfer of this dataset the system was held in Oracle 8.

The Lottery Awards Database User Guide5 indicates that the type of interface available to users in DCMS is a Windows-type interface (using pull-down menus, dialogue boxes etc). The user guide illustrates in detail the functions available to users of the system.

See the 'Logical structure and schema' section of the Dataset Catalogues for details of the structure of individual datasets.

The Lottery Awards Database is dynamic, in the sense that updated information about the status of a lottery award may be entered on the system via the regular updates received by DCMS from the Distributing Bodies overwriting data previously received. The database also records some of the changes made as a result of the import of data from QAS Ltd (for example, in the AWREDERIVE table) it may therefore be seen as having some static aspects as well.

Awards data is supplied to the DCMS for upload to the database by each of the Distributing Bodies in the form of a tab separated extract file. Extract files contain data for new and updated awards, the exact content of the extract files is discussed in detail in the Awards Database User Guide and the Specification of Requirements paper, see the Dataset Documentation Catalogue for further information. Additional data is received via regular updates from a private company QAS Ltd which can be used to validate the address details supplied to the Distributing Bodies by applicants (see also Scope and Content).

The contents of the data files containing the Awards are validated by the Oracle database. All fields must be present, unless specifically marked otherwise. Awards may be inserted or updated, if an award already exists on the Awards Database, it is assumed by the system that it is to be updated using the information contained in the file, otherwise the award is treated as an insertion.

Details of the content and transformation validation checks performed by NDAD staff on the Awards dataset are contained in the catalogues of individual datasets: see Links to dataset catalogues.

Dataset catalogues provide more detailed information about individual datasets, and are currently available for the following dataset(s):

1. Dataset Documentation Catalogue, reference CRDA/39/DD/2/1, Lottery Awards Database Online User Guide; Emails between NDAD and DCMS, October 2002.

2. DCMS web site (http://www.culture.gov.uk/what_we_do/National_lottery/) consulted on 15 November 2006.

3. DCMS Lottery Funded: The National Lottery, leaflet consulted at http://www.culture.gov.uk/PDF/Lottery_Leaflet.pdf on 17 Oct 2002; Raymond Snoddy & Jon Ashworth, It Could Be You, The Untold Story of the UK National Lottery (London, Faber and Faber, 2000). Further information about the lottery funding bodies can be found at http://www.lotteryfunding.org.uk

4. Dataset Documentation Catalogue, reference CRDA/39/DD/3/2, Lottery Awards Database Physical Design Specification

5. Dataset Documentation Catalogue, reference CRDA/39/DD/2/1, Lottery Awards Database Online User Guide