Unclaimed Lottery Prizes

As regular readers of my lottery blog will know, I sometimes like to challenge the conventions of the National Lottery organisers and propose a different way of doing things. This week is one of those times, and my proposal on this occasion concerns the way that unclaimed lottery prizes are dealt with.

Under National Lottery rules, lottery winners have up to 180 days from the date of the draw to claim their prize. If they happen to miss this deadline, their prize is automatically transferred to the fund for Good Causes. Whilst that sounds all very nice from a charitable point of view, the Good Causes fund already benefits from 28p in every £1 spent on lottery tickets, so I don’t see why it should receive the rest of our hard-earned cash just because some absent-minded buffoon forgets to claim his or her prize.

Okay, so technically the prize has already been won, so the rest of us have no right to it anyway. But surely there are alternative ways of putting unclaimed lottery prizes to good use that rewards the lottery players themselves? I can personally think of two viable alternatives...

The first is to add any unclaimed prize to the jackpot fund for the next draw. For example, if a prize expires on Thursday 30 April, 2009, the cash could be added to the draw for either Saturday 02 May or Wednesday 06 May.

The second option is to collect all unclaimed prizes for the year and use them to fund a Christmas Jackpot draw. I can’t be the only player who misses the old Christmas Millionaire Maker game, and using unclaimed lottery prizes to fund a festive jackpot would mean that tickets could be sold for less than the £5 that used to be the case.

I understand that some readers might think I’m being a bit of a scrooge for suggesting alternatives to handing everything straight over to the Good Causes fund, but that isn’t the case at all. I simply think that if a sum of money has been set aside to be paid out as a prize then it should actually be paid out as a prize – especially since lottery players have no control over how money in the Good Causes fund is used.

Article Last Updated: 23/06/2010 09:50:08

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