Category: Horse Racing

Culture, media and sport committee questions bear a striking similarity to those racing industry has been asking

Last Tuesday’s announcement by the Gambling Commission that it planned to introduce “financial risk assessments” – or affordability checks – for gambling customers seemed to mark the end of racing’s fierce, five-and-a-half-year campaign against the policy, but there has been a further twist to the extended tale after it emerged that the House of Commons’ culture, media and sport committee (CMSC) has written to the commission, requesting answers to a series of questions on the checks by 24 July.

The cross-party committee’s questions for the regulator bear a striking similarity to many of those that the racing industry has been asking – to little or no avail – since checks were first proposed under the last Conservative government in late 2020.

Gambling Commission set to rubber-stamp new regulations that could inflict irreparable damage on the racing industry

James Noyes, one of the initial proponents of affordability checks for gamblers, has issued an urgent call for a pause in their implementation. Stuart Andrew MP, the gambling minister in the last government and also a former supporter of checks, agrees with him. The British Horseracing Authority has suggested that implementation could cost the industry £250m annually in revenue as punters refuse to supply personal financial information to gambling operators and shift to the unregulated black market instead.

At a board meeting scheduled for Thursday, the Gambling Commission is expected to ignore the rising tide of concern and rubber-stamp the formal introduction financial risk assessments, as the Commission calls them. Tens of thousands, conceivably hundreds of thousands, of punters with licensed UK firms could soon be required to provide documentation on salary or assets before they can continue to gamble, despite initial promises – from Andrew, among others – that the process would be frictionless for all but a minority.

• Track forced to cancel scheduled meetings

• Chaotic concert aftermath led to legal action

The oft-troubled history of Chelmsford City racecourse in Essex took its latest turn for the worse on Wednesday when the track lost its licence to host fixtures. This means the cancellation of scheduled meetings including the lucrative Good Friday fixture and putting the long-term future of the venue in serious doubt.

There have been enough twists in the Chelmsford saga that Justin Timberlake’s apparent walk-on part in the latest chapter is just one more to add to the list. The singer’s concert at the track on 4 July 2025 led to chaotic scenes when 25,000 fans left afterwards, forcing some to queue for up to four hours and others to abandon their cars and walk along the nearby A131 dual carriageway.

• Labour peer leaves sport facing governance troubles

• Major tracks call for urgent review of their association

A grouping that includes most of Britain’s major racecourses on Tuesday fired the opening shot in what could prove to be a civil war involving the country’s tracks, following confirmation by the British ­Horseracing Authority earlier in the day that Charles Allen had resigned from his position as chair of the sport’s ruling body after just six months in the role.

Jockey Club Racecourses, which controls a significant number of high‑profile tracks ­including ­Cheltenham, Aintree, Epsom and Newmarket, issued a joint ­statement with four of the biggest “independent” courses: Ascot, ­Newbury, York and Goodwood shortly after Lord Allen had issued a statement of his own, confirming his departure.

• Duty for betting on horse racing unchanged at 15%

• ‘We want to maintain Britain’s place on world stage’

Charles Allen, the chair of the British Horseracing Authority, paid tribute on Wednesday to “everyone who has played their part across the sport” after the budget announcement by the chancellor, Rachel Reeves, that the rate of duty for betting on horse racing will remain unchanged at 15%.

Confirmation that racing would be exempt from tax hikes on online casino gaming as well as betting on football and other sports follows a seven-month campaign under the slogan “Axe The Racing Tax”. It was initially launched in response to a Treasury proposal to “harmonise” the duty paid on betting and gaming at a single rate.

The Hillsin affair demonstrates that conspiring to stop a runner is one thing, but getting away with it is another

A little over two years after one of the most bizarre and downright suspicious riding performances on a British racecourse in recent decades, the British Horseracing Authority’s independent disciplinary panel confirmed last week that Dylan Kitts had deliberately stopped Hillsin from winning a handicap hurdle at Worcester on 5 July 2023, in a conspiracy with John Higgins, an associate of Hillsin’s owner, to profit from “lay” bets on the gelding.

A few days earlier, meanwhile, a 42-year-old man from Bury was arrested by Greater Manchester Police, following an investigation by the Gambling Commission “in connection with allegations of fixing horse races”.