Society Lotteries

Lotteries are a fantastic way for societies to create an extra income stream.

In simple terms, a lottery is a kind of gambling that has three essential elements:

• Payment is required to participate, and every entry is the same price.
• One or more prizes are awarded.
• Those prizes are awarded by chance.

Lotteries can be simple lottery or complex.

It’s a simple lottery if:

• People are required to pay to participate.
• There are one or more prizes.
• The prizes are allocated by a process which relies wholly on chance.

It’s a complex lottery if:

• he prizes are allocated by a series of processes, where the first of those processes relies wholly on chance. So, the prizes could ultimately be determined by a game of skill, but the participants must have been chosen at random in the first instance.

There are a few exceptions where the lottery doesn’t need to be registered (or licensed).

An incidental lottery is one that is incidental to a commercial or non-commercial event.

The lottery must be promoted wholly for a purpose other than that of private gain i.e. the lottery can only be promoted for charitable or other ‘good cause’ purposes – and cannot be run for private or commercial gain. The event may last more than a single day.

There are three types of private lotteries permitted by the Act:

• Private society lottery
• Work lottery
• Residents’ lottery

Private lotteries must comply with conditions set out in the Gambling Act . This includes conditions relating to advertising, which state that no advertisement for a private society, work or residents’ lottery may be displayed or distributed except at the society or work premises, or the relevant residence, nor may it be sent to any other premises. Private lotteries must also comply with conditions relating to tickets. In summary these are:

• a ticket in a private lottery may be sold or supplied only by or on behalf of the promoters.
• tickets (and the rights they represent) are non-transferable.
• the price paid for each ticket in a private lottery must be the same and must be paid to the promoters of the lottery before anyone is given a ticket.
• the arrangements for private lotteries must not include a rollover of prizes from one lottery to another.

A customer lottery is a lottery promoted by a person (the promoter) who occupies premises in Great Britain in the course of business. No ticket in the lottery is sold or supplied to a person except at a time when he is on the business premises as a customer of the promoter.