Scotland’s Orkney Islands see highest Lottery Grants per person in the UK – Scottish Business News

by Admin
November 13, 2024

National Lottery players contributed £504 million towards good causes this year alone. Most of them went to London, North West England and Scotland. When measuring grants proportional to local authority populations, Orkney Islands in Scotland topped the list, with £76.83 won per capita so far this year.

This is according to a new study from NoDepositRewards.org, which analysed all 9,005 National Lottery grants awarded between January 1^st and September 30^th this year, as listed on UK Department for Culture, Media and Sports. Notably, the researchers noticed some projects reported in the media were missing from the government data, hence all the findings below are strictly based on the data available on the UK Department for Culture, Media and Sports website at the time of collection, on October 9^th.

UK’s 10 most lottery-funded places per capita (Jan-Sep 2024)

#	Local authority	Grant amount per capita (£)	Total grant amount (£)	Arts (£)	Charitable and Community including Health, Education and Environment (£)	Heritage (£)	Sport (£)
1	Orkney Islands	76.73	1,689,629	38,754	0	736,640	914,235
2	Blackburn with Darwen	46.16	7,269,594	0	565,810	0	6,703,784
3	Cardiff	40.68	15,604,144	6,490,949	1,866,226	605,645	6,641,324
4	Westminster	40.54	8,573,679	3,930,913	3,078,403	1,362,588	201,775
5	Charnwood	34.32	6,452,071	0	1,407,406	0	5,044,665
6	Richmond upon Thames	30.36	5,935,043	125,140	800,010	5,009,893	0
7	Belfast	29.13	10,051,272	4,854,292	4,634,863	562,117	0
8	Gwynedd	26.70	3,182,422	504,751	336,724	1,056,802	1,284,145
9	Stirling	26.54	2,456,088	172,166	126,620	0	2,157,302
10	Islington	25.69	5,666,682	842,797	3,875,724	935,336	12,825

Orkney Islands constitute the most lottery-funded local authority in the UK. This pristine archipelago off the northeastern coast of mainland Scotland has a population of just 22,020. Each of them benefitted from £76.73 from the National Lottery this year. Of the total of £1.69 million allocated to the Orkney Islands this year, more than half went towards sports-related causes (£914,235 or £41.52 per capita). Heritage projects still attracted significant funding, worth £33.45 per capita. The remaining funds went towards arts.

From January until the end of September, the National Lottery sponsored 9,005 good causes nationwide, worth a total £504 million. 60% of these funds went towards charitable and community causes across the UK.

“Some less populated areas may need more funding than others due to scarcity of local sources,” said a spokesperson for NoDepositRewards.org.

“Across the UK, there are currently 36 grants available to apply for, some offering as much as ten million pounds, such as for heritage projects. There are also funding distributors who allocate necessary funding regionally or depending on the cause area, like Sport NI, Arts Council Wales, Creative Scotland, British Film Institute and many others. You can find them all on the Lottery Good Causes website.”