Almost any organisation in the United Kingdom, including registered charities, can apply for lottery funding for projects which are not intended primarily for private gain and for which funds would be unlikely to be made available by Government or the devolved administrations.
Under the National Lottery Act 2006, “charitable expenditure”, in relation to expenditure under the charitable, health, education and environment good causes, means expenditure for a charitable, benevolent or philanthropic purpose. Such expenditure is not restricted to registered charities, which are able to benefit from all the lottery good causes.
However, each of the lottery distributing bodies publishes specific eligibility criteria for each of its funding programmes, and applicant organisations must comply with these.