Four Weeks Left to Have Your Say on National Lottery Funding, Warns England Athletics

Most grassroots sport in the UK cannot survive without the money brought in from national and local funding. The Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) has now opened a call for evidence on the future of National Lottery good cause funding, and the response from within sport is worth noting and, ideally, contributing to. For many clubs and governing bodies, funding streams like this one are not a bonus on top of their work, they form the infrastructure underneath all of it.

England Athletics offers a useful case study in what's actually at stake. In 2024/25 alone, it received £1.46 million through Sport England and National Lottery funding — money that, by the organisation's own account, underpins the governance structures, safeguarding systems, coaching pathways and club support that keep grassroots running and athletics functioning at anything like their current scale.

Since 1994, the Lottery has generated more than £53 billion for good causes across the UK, spanning elite and grassroots sport, cultural institutions and local community projects — a figure that makes clear how much of the country's sporting and cultural infrastructure has been quietly built on this single funding source.

What England Athletics' funding specifically supports is instructive, because very little of it is visible to the average club member. This includes, but is not limited to: 

• Safeguarding and welfare systems, including a dedicated welfare team
• Coach and official education pathways that keep the sport's workforce accredited and current
• Competition licensing standards covering events as significant as the London Marathon and Great North Run
• And nine regional Club Support Managers providing practical advice and connecting clubs to share good practice

It also funds equality, diversity and inclusion work, including mental wellbeing programmes and inclusive club development, alongside talent pathways and facility investment support.

Perhaps the clearest illustration of what this funding buys in practice is RunTogether, the participation programme that has helped more than 207,000 people become active through running and supported over 3,500 community running groups across England. This kind of low-barrier, community-level access tends to depend entirely on institutional backing rather than existing on its own.

Beyond athletics, every national governing body, from the smallest niche sport to the largest, likely has its own version of this same dependency — the unglamorous administrative and developmental work that Lottery funding quietly makes possible, and that would be difficult to replace if funding priorities shifted. That's precisely why DCMS is casting a wide net, seeking views from organisations and individuals alike rather than governing bodies in isolation.

The call for evidence closes at midday on 23 September 2026. Any club, coach, volunteer or governing body with a stake in how this funding is shaped going forward has a narrow window left to submit their view directly through the government's consultation page, or risk leaving the funding’s future to chance.