Redbridge Council is weighing up plans for a borough-wide community lottery – and says it will dedicate more than half of the proceeds to “good causes”.

The council submitted a proposal that will be discussed at the overview meeting on Monday, December 9 to set up a new online weekly lottery with a draw every Saturday night at 8pm.

Tickets for the yet to be named lottery will cost £1 and would be purchased online.

When purchasing tickets players would be able to choose from a list of local charities or "good cause funds" based on their postcode.

The council would set the criteria for which organisations would qualify as a "good cause" to benefit from the lottery.

By law the council has to spend a minimum of 20pc of the lottery proceeds on the community, but Redbridge Council pledged to create a model where 60pc would be spent locally.

The Redbridge lottery will be offering double the amount compared to all other national scale lotteries including the National Lottery (28pc), the postcode lottery (30pc) and the Health Lottery (20.3pc).

The council chose to appoint Gatherwell Ltd, a lottery management company as the External Lottery Manager (ELM) provider.

Gatherwell, which delivers lotteries for more than 40 councils including Barking & Dagenham, would run the lottery on the council's behalf.

The council is required to obtain two quotes before awarding the lottery contract but in this case they decided to waive that requirement and approve Gatherwell directly.

Two other ELM providers, Hive and Sterling, were also considered but in the end the council decided to only obtain a quote from Gatherwell as they said they had the best track record with previous contracts with other councils.

The initial costs to set up the lottery will total £5,594 with Gatherwell receiving £5,000 up-front, and the remaining money going towards application fees.

The costs to set it up along with the annual costs of £4,042 will be paid for using existing budgets.

The report said that based on the experience of similar councils, they can expect to raise a maximum of £100,000 for good causes in the first year but realistically they expect the number will be half of that, between £40,000 and £50,000, based on its popularity and the marketing efforts.

Once the lottery is running Gatherwell will receive 16.67pc of the proceeds to fund the running of the lottery and the council estimates the contract will be £80,000 for the three year contract, including the one-off set up fee.