Ashfield misses out on Lotto cash

Gloria De Piero, Ashfield's MP asked the House of Commons library for an analysis of the distribution of lottery funding over the past five years and said she was 'disappointed' at the figures.

Ashfield ranked 426th out of 649 constituencies, with the money mainly awarded from the Big Lottery Fund, with just under £15,000 coming from Arts Council England.

In 2016/17, Ashfield did slightly better than in previous years, being awarded nearly £1.5m, including nearly £1m of Heritage Lottery funding.

Ashfield ranked as 266th out of the constituencies that year.

In 2015/16 Ashfield was 391st with £744,833 of lottery funding received; in 2014/15 it was ranked 362nd with £930,359 and in 2013/14 it was ranked at just 485th with £633,820.

The vast majority of lottery cash awarded to Ashfield in the last five years has been from the Big Lottery Fund.

A small amount has come from Sport England but no funding has been given to the area by the British Film Institute or UK Sport.

Ms De Piero said: “These figures are a really disappointing read.

“I have been raising the issue that the National Lottery funding distributors need to do more to ensure areas like ours receive a fairer share of cash for several years now, but we have actually been given less this year than before.

“The figures show a clear bias towards constituencies in big cities so there is clearly much more work to be done to even up this disparity.”

For comparison, both Nottingham East and Nottingham South constituencies received around £2.7m each in 2017/18, but the biggest sums of several millions were predominantly awarded to constituencies in the London and South-East and the Greater Manchester area.