New BHA chief’s lengthy to-do list
Joe Saumarez Smith, the Winchester-educated businessman, must have known he was diving into shark-infested waters when he was recently anointed as the chairman of the British Horseracing Authority.
The first thing he will have to do if his tenure is to be more successful than the last incumbent’s will be to get the factions that are fighting a passive-aggressive cold war to agree a strategy for the industry they can all sign up to.
The second step, and this is the big one, will be to persuade said factions that only the BHA can lead the industry as, unlike the racecourses and to some extent the Thoroughbred
Group, which represent the practitioners at the coal face, it is the only entity which does not have commercial interests that tend to succumb to short-term sticking plaster solutions.
Saumarez Smith will already know that it will be impossible to get the various groups to agree on the best solutions, even if they can identify the problems, such as the construct of a new, more dynamic Levy-funding mechanism, staff shortages in racing yards, or the size of the fixture list. Even the implication of the recent whip review will stretch any collective support Saumarez Smith may have.
The new chairman also needs to re-engage with senior politicians, but, given the correct approach, he could be knocking on receptive doors. Senior cabinet ministers, including Priti Patel, Ben Wallace and Nadhim Zahawi, are incredibly knowledgeable on horse racing and have constituency interests in the industry.
They will, however, want to see what racing is doing about cutting the waste, leakage and duplication around its media deals, all of which are highlighted by the bookmakers when they argue their contributions are not spent efficiently.
But if Saumarez Smith wants to demonstrate he is a man they can do business with, he needs to take a leaf out of Zahawi’s book and win his case using data. The main reason why Zahawi’s rollout of the Covid vaccine programme was so successful was because he collected the data and published it daily, when, under normal modus operandi, the civil service would have published it once a fortnight. That transparency won the trust and support of the public.
So if the BHA wants to convince politicians that, for instance, more skilled staff weighing no more than 9st 7lb are needed from abroad in training yards, it must back that argument up with geographically accurate live data.
It might also think about taking the same approach to the blight of small fields. While the British Flat Pattern and Listed race programme has to be agreed well in advance with our European counterparts, would it not be possible to have a self-determining fixture list that responds to up-to-date data fed in by trainers?
In other words, a programme of races that matches the fit-and-ready-to-run horse population, as opposed to one that bears no relation to the animals who are ready to perform.
Philip Davies MP was leading the news on Times Radio last Friday for accepting tickets worth £25,000 to race meetings while lobbying the Government on behalf of the BHA to get race meetings back on track during lockdown.
The only time I have ever come across Davies – a member of the Parliamentary All-party Betting and Gaming Group – on a racecourse, we have both been sponging a good lunch off a bookmaker. It is clearly obvious why it would be unacceptable for him to lobby the Government to the commercial benefit of a gambling operator. But lobbying on behalf of the entire industry is a different matter, and good for him for doing so. If Saumarez Smith has any sense, he will be inviting a lot more MPS to the races than Davies.
It is, after all, Saumarez Smith’s job to explain to politicians what the racing industry needs to survive; and it is their job to come along, have a large drink and listen.