The winning project, to be picked in a mass poll of viewers in a series broadcast next year by ITV1 or BBC1, will have an ambitious brief to transform the quality of life in Britain.
If successful, the concept will be repeated in 2006 and 2007. One supporter said: “This has got enormous potential to transform the way the public regard the lottery.”
However, there are fears that Labour’s plan could set in train a rerun of the blunders of the Millennium Dome. “A vague brief and a populist agenda is a dangerous combination,” said one adviser.
The award will be provided by the Big Lottery Fund, a new body which will distribute half of the money raised by the lottery for good causes. The plan will be approved by its board next month.
The fund, created this summer by a merger of two other distributors, will also absorb the Millennium Commission, which gave £606m to the dome at Greenwich.
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Mike O’Connor, director of the Millennium Commission, said the plan demonstrated the government still had confidence in large-scale lottery projects. “Of the 215 projects we funded, only two have failed,” he said.
One such failure was last week’s closure of the Earth Centre, an environmental attraction built on colliery spoilheaps near Doncaster, Yorkshire, with £36m of lottery money. In its first year, it attracted only a fifth of a projected 500,000 visitors.
O’Connor said he hoped the televised contest would pick a winner on a par with some of his greatest successes. These include the Eden Project in Cornwall, which received a grant of £53.2m, and Tate Modern in London, with £51.4m.
“It was difficult to predict which ones would succeed — to many people the Eden Project, for example, looked like quite a risk,” he said.
The idea for the television show is inspired by the success of viewer participation shows such as the BBC’s Restoration, presented by Griff Rhys Jones. It gave £3m of lottery money to the building judged by viewers to have the best claim to preservation.
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A different celebrity might present merits of each of the 16 or so rival schemes which would contend for the prize.
For ITV, the show’s climax could be timed to coincide with celebrations of its 50th anniversary next September.