Two weeks ago, the Department for Culture, Media and Sport announced that Lisa Nandy had appointed Sunder Katwala to the board of the National Lottery Community Fund — the public body that decides where the nation’s lottery “good causes” money goes.[1]
Katwala is not a newcomer to public life. He spent eight years, from 2003 to 2011, leading the Fabian Society — Labour’s oldest think tank, the one that claims every Labour prime minister as a member and half of Keir Starmer’s cabinet. He is now Director of British Future, a charity and think tank dedicated, in its own words, to the politics of “identity, immigration and integration.” Since May he has also sat as a Commissioner on the Equality and Human Rights Commission.[1]
So: a man who ran the Labour movement’s policy machine for a decade, and whose day job is now writing about the politics of immigration and national identity, has been given a seat at the table of the body that distributes the lottery windfall.
There is a reason that matters. Earlier this month we documented — with three grants checked to the penny on the public register — that the same National Lottery Community Fund has poured £114.7 million into migration-linked charities over five years, with a single-year spike to £43.3 million in 2024-25 alone.[3]
The form said “no significant political activity”
The Government’s own appointment notice is what makes this more than a gentleman’s club membership. Under the Cabinet Office’s Governance Code, public appointees must declare any significant political activity they have undertaken in the last five years — defined as holding office, public speaking, making a recordable donation, or candidature for election.
The release states that Katwala and his co-appointee Michelle Mitchell “have not declared any significant political activity.”[1]
Now here’s the thing. The Code’s own definition of “politically active” — footnote four — is narrow: it covers being employed by a political party, holding significant office in a party, standing as a candidate, publicly speaking on behalf of a party, or making significant donations to a party.[4]
Do ten years at the helm of Labour’s affiliated policy machine count? Does running a charity that exists to shape the national debate on immigration count? On the face of the Code as written, arguably not. That’s the loophole in full view — and it’s worth stating plainly, because the structure is the story, not the man.[2][4]
The revolving door, in public view
Put the pieces on the table:
- The Fabians are Labour’s policy laboratory — a £1.2m-a-year operation that travels with almost no statutory oversight (not a company, not a charity, files with no regulator), yet feeds ministers into government.[5][6]
- Its former leader now helps set priorities at the NLCF, the statutory distributor of more than £13 billion in lottery grants in the last two decades.[3]
- That same distributor has steered a five-year, £114.7m flow into the migration and refugee charity network, on our audit’s count — the very intellectual lane Katwala’s career has occupied for twenty years.[3]
Nobody is saying Katwala is crooked. What the record shows is a revolving door between the Left’s migration policy machine and the public body that hands out the national lottery’s cash — a door that turns without the appointee’s political past registering on the form at all, because the Code’s five-year clock stops counting the moment the office tenure slips out of view.
That is the story. Not the man: the structure that lets a decade of Labour-affiliated leadership be logged, in the Government’s own words, as “no significant political activity.”
Follow the money — it explains the appointments.
Sources
- GOV.UK, “Two new Members appointed to The National Lottery Community Fund Board”, 7 Aug 2026 — https://www.gov.uk/government/news/two-new-members-appointed-to-the-national-lottery-community-fund-board (accessed 2026-08-23)
- NLCF, “Our Board” — https://www.tnlcommunityfund.org.uk/about-us/our-people/our-board (accessed 2026-08-23)
- GrantNav/360Giving migration grant records verified against the shadowcanman audit — research/lottery-migration-machine/ (verified 2026-08-18); £114.7m aggregate attributed to the auditor’s filter.
- Cabinet Office, Governance Code on Public Appointments (Oct 2025) — https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/governance-code-for-public-appointments (accessed 2026-08-23)
- Fabian Society, “About us” — https://fabians.org.uk/about-us/ (accessed 2026-08-23) — “a Labour affiliate and one of the party’s original founders”; “Every Labour prime minister has been a Fabian”
- Fabian Society, Annual Report 2024-25 — https://fabians.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/ANNUAL-REPORT-2024-2025-3.pdf (accessed 2026-08-23) — FY2024-25 income £1.21m, deficit £56,472