Health lottery boosts charities’ wealth

TELEVISION favourite Eamonn Holmes yesterday started to hand out cheques worth many hundreds of thousands of pounds to UK charities benefiting from the new Health Lottery. Among the first to receive donations from its historic first nationwide draw were the WRVS, the Youth Sport Trust and the School Food Trust. The new lottery will make a donation every week to small, under-funded charities which have successfully campaigned for funding from the newly-established People’s Health Trust. The Trust, an independent body, aims to support local health schemes that fall outside the capabilities of the already over-stretched NHS. Verity Haines collected a cheque for £37,500 for the WRVS, which helps give comfort to the elderly, while BTCV in Scotland received £27,932. Meanwhile, Judi Gasser of the School Food Trust, together with James Whiting and Cat Sheppard, collected a bumper cheque for £44,069 and the Youth Sport Trust received £40,579.More cheques will be paid out over the coming days. Eamonn, 51, said: “It’s good to see all this come to fruition and for me this is what the Health Lottery is all about – people winning money and helping good causes. The thing is, there are no ‘bad’ charities and you would help them all if you could. But it’s true that some are very dear to your heart. “My wife Ruth supports the Alzheimer’s Society a great deal because her father suffers with that. And, for me, the cancer charities are the ones that really get to me – it is such an awful disease and causes so much grief. Meningitis is a personal fear of mine too, for my children. You think you have raised them and they are safe but it’s a very potent and scary illness that can take a grip so quickly.” John Hume, chief executive of the People’s Health Trust, “We will be working directly with the relevant communities to identify practical and sustainable ways in which funding from the Health Lottery can have real impacts on health and well-being in communities experiencing significant disadvantages.” Saturday’s first-ever televised draw – which saw two winners land the top prize of £100,000 – was seen by 10million viewers on ITV1 and Channel 5. A staggering number of tickets were sold for the draw, putting the Health Lottery on track to generate £50million for health-related good causes in the next 12 months. One of the top £100,000 prize winners was a 63-year-old woman from Bolton-Le-Sands in Morecambe, Lancs, whose sister suffers from multiple sclerosis. The winner, who wanted to remain anonymous, said: “I was keen to try a new lottery and for me one of the best reasons was that the money would benefit people and health causes.” Eamonn added: “I try to support as many charities as possible and it is always difficult saying no.”