I CANNOT get terribly worked up about the revelation that the National Lottery is hoarding £2.4 billion of money earmarked for charities and community projects. Given the calibre of some of the “worthy causes” that have been doled out grants in the past — including groups that sympathised with terrorists — perhaps the longer the money remains safely stashed away the better.

What does bother me, on the other hand, is that the existence of the National Lottery is preventing charities from raising funds directly through their own lotteries. The Government has made huge efforts to establish markets — in gas, electricity and bus travel — where once there were only poorly performing public sector monoliths. The Competition Commission now has such sharp teeth that games manufacturers and private school bursars have been threatened with jail at the merest suggestion that they might be operating cartels.

Yet when it comes to raising money through lotteries ministers will go to great lengths to preserve the State’s monopoly. The Department for Culture, Media and Sport recently warned television stations not to make the questions on their phone-in quizzes too easy for fear of falling foul of the new Gambling Act: the law dictates that all competitions run by commercial organisations must contain an element of skill and must not be lotteries in disguise. I find the move objectionable on the ground of economic freedom, if not open discrimination against people of low intelligence.

While charities are theoretically allowed to operate lotteries, what chance of competing with the National Lottery, whose tickets are available in every town and village in the land and which enjoys a dedicated slot on the BBC? The cancer charity Tenovus used to run a nationwide lottery before it was snuffed out by the National Lottery, where a mere 28 pence of every £1 ticket goes to worthy causes.

More money could be raised simply by deregulating all charities and competitions, allowing anyone to run them — while taxing all winnings at 40 per cent. At present winners of multimillion-pound National Lottery prizes pay no tax on their windfalls. The Government should abolish the National Lottery, sack its quangocrats on their fat salaries, and throw open the lottery sector to all-comers. What’s wrong with a free market in luck?