​Good cause cash increases on the back of rising Lotto ticket sales

Good causes benefited to the tune of £1.8 billion last year on the back of National Lottery sales – a 2.5% increase on the previous year.

It means the total to date raised by the weekly draws for good causes is just over £33bn since it first began in 1994.

The Lottery had a 7.5% increase in revenue from ticket sales, said Camelot UK, with National Lottery ticket purchases standing at £7.3bn for the year to March 2015, an increase of £546 million year on year since 2013.

Performance was partly driven by improving sales of its flagship Lotto game, which, after a decade of decline and a re-launch with a higher-priced minimum stake of £2, has started to grow again.

But its marketing efforts were strongest around instant play.

Seventy new scratchcards and online Instant Win games were launched, and the roll-out of 10,000 standalone terminals to satisfy “untapped demand” for Scratchcards was completed.

As a result, instant play games accounted for 86% of the total increase in sales last year.

Around 40% of all cash for good causes money goes to the Big Lottery Fund, the main distributor.