As the regional manager of the National Lottery Charities Board in Yorkshire I must respond to your comment on October 7 (End secret of Lottery grants) and the related story on St Leonard's Hospice.

You claim that the whole system of awarding points is 'shrouded in secrecy', and that we are 'arrogant' in avoiding 'systematic public scrutiny'. In fact quite the opposite is true - the Yorkshire and Humber Regional Awards Committee meetings have been open to the public since January 1999. The Charities board is constantly aiming to be open, accountable, objective and honest.

It was in Yorkshire that we pioneered open meetings - our next committee meeting is on November 2 at our Leeds office. If you or any of your readers want to come along you will be very welcome.

You are quite right to say that there is an 'incontrovertible and widespread need' for the work of St Leonard's Hospice. It is a very deserving cause indeed - as are the other 43 hospices we have awarded £12.6 million to in recent months.

We judge every application solely on its own merits - we do NOT make subjective judgements about whether one group is more deserving than another. Our scoring system for applications is very thorough and fair, and has been widely praised by the voluntary sector.

In St Leonard's case we had concerns over its application and we didn't feel we could fund it at this time. We wrote to the hospice to explain this and to say that we would be happy to discuss this further with them, and to invite them to apply again in the future.

We communicate with every group that is unsuccessful in this way.

But at present we don't give out public information about unsuccessful applications. We don't want to publicly stigmatise groups as 'failures' when the reason for 'rejection' may be that we just don't have enough money.

The law is also complicated here and we are seeking clarification of the Data Protection Act and other laws to see how they affect us.

Incidentally, one member of our committee - Ben Clarke - was selected entirely at random from the electoral roll. Ben is from York and is a student in Sheffield - and two other committee members live in York. We have so far awarded more than £16 million to almost 300 good causes in North Yorkshire.

Helen Wollaston,

Regional Manager,

Yorkshire & Humber Office,

National Lottery Charities Board,

St Paul's Street, Leeds.

Converted for the new archive on 30 June 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.