THE finger of fate is not pointing at Bury when it comes to hitting the National Lottery jackpot.

For the borough receives less money than many other local authorities nationwide.

Latest figures show that Bury is ranked 325 out of 436 local authorities when it comes to sharing in the National Lottery Good Causes fund.

The Lottery has awarded an average of just £68.89 for each person in the borough, compared to a UK average of £191.33 per person.

If Bury had achieved the UK average, an extra £22 million would have been awarded to the area since the Lottery was set up in November 1994.

The statistics have been published in the j4b Calculation of Lottery Dispersal (COLD) Facts Index, and revealed the five authorities which received the biggest pot of Lottery cash per head per population were: Greenwich, Westminster, City of London, Camden and Islington.

The perceived imbalance in Lottery money handouts has been branded as "typical of the North-South divide" by some critics.

But Mr Jeremy Phillips, managing director of j4b's technology and information publishing arm, explained: "The National Lottery Funding Bodies judge each application on a competitive basis to ensure it can deliver on its promises, rather than just splitting the money between whoever asks for it.

"As the application process is not straightforward, local authority funding officers must decide whether a speculative application is a good use of their resources."