Racing’s ‘rural revolt’ should not be used in gambling checks battle

It was free-to-enter for the seven-race card at Fakenham on Sunday – but only if you arrived in a tractor, and parked in the middle of the track where the ITV Racing cameras – which were making a rare excursion to the Norfolk course – could see you. Around 50 turned up as part of a protest that David Hunter, Fakenham’s veteran chief executive, said earlier this month would “illustrate the sense of frustration the rural community and businesses have about this devastating farm inheritance tax that Keir Starmer’s government is determined to implement.”

Hunter’s initial hope that the infield would “filled with line upon line of tractors” was not entirely fulfilled, but it still made for an arresting sight as the leaders galloped down the short home straight. So much so, in fact, that George Freeman MP, the Tory member for nearby mid-Norfolk, was moved to talk about a “rural revolt … [which] will be driven by farming and the rural service economy, but also by racing.” If racing “gets together with farming and the broader rural economy,” he added, “we could win this.”

As an additional reason for racing to “get together” with opposition MPs in the attempted “revolt”, Freeman also referenced the vexed and long-running issue of “affordability” checks on punters, claiming that the potential effect on racing’s finances is part of “a broader attack on rural life, the countryside and the rural economy”.

That feels like a bit of a stretch, but if you are old enough to remember the strength of feeling among some members of the racing fraternity about the Hunting With Dogs Act 2004, and their eagerness to co-opt racing to the cause of defeating it, it may feel a little familiar too. Hunter and Fakenham, in fact, were at the forefront there too. If fox hunting is banned, its enthusiasts kept telling us, then jump racing will be next. Which, as it turned out, was nonsense.

That is not to suggest that the rural community’s concerns over inheritance tax are unfounded, but rather to act as a reminder that the sport has a well-established habit of allowing itself to be used as a shield in other peoples’ battles.

When betting-shop operators claimed that restricting the stakes on £100-a-spin gaming machines would lead to the closure of most, or even all, high-street shops, with ruinous implications for racing’s finances, few in the sport were prepared to disagree. That, too, turned out to be nonsense.

And now, just a few years later, racing is apparently being recruited to the fight against inheritance tax reform, via the campaign over “affordability checks” that has preoccupied the sport and its senior figures for the last two years.

This is already an issue that has become somewhat confused. A 100,000-signature petition prompted a parliamentary debate on checks in February last year, and scarcely a day seems to pass without the Racing Post, the sport’s trade paper, highlighting the latest punter who has become “ensnared” in checks. High-profile names in the sport including Joe Saumarez Smith, the chair of the British Horseracing Authority, and Laurence Robertson, the former MP for Tewkesbury, have featured in recent weeks.

The checks proposed in a White Paper in April 2023, however, and due to be implemented by the Gambling Commission, have barely reached the starting stalls. A six-month pilot, which does not involve any direct interaction with customers, is due to conclude next month, and the stated aim of the checks – or “financial risk assessments”, as the GC puts it – when fully rolled out is that only a very small fraction of those affected will even know a check is taking place.

So why have so many senior figures in racing been complaining about the impact of affordability checks on betting turnover for many months? It is because the gambling operators have been busily imposing many thousands of checks on punters according to their own, undisclosed criteria. Whether by accident or design, most of these checks appear from the subsequent coverage to be far more intrusive and irritating than the situation requires, and are having an impact on punters’ betting habits as a result.

Whether customers who gamble on the operators’ hugely-profitable online slots – which are the prime target of the campaigners who argued for checks in the first place – are getting the same treatment, it is impossible to say.

There are sound reasons to fear that the thresholds on customers’ deposits and losses that the Gambling Commission eventually applies to high-risk slot and casino products will prove to be wholly unsuitable for the very different patterns involved in betting, which carries a significantly lower risk of problem gambling. As a result, it is right for racing to argue that the regulator should apply different criteria to sports betting.

Unfortunately, though, the best time to be making that argument was 20 years ago, when FOBTs were legitimised in the last Gambling Act. Instead, the sport did little or nothing to stand up for betting and attack the wholesale proliferation of casino gaming.

The official, Commission-led checks are on the way whether we like it or not. Unlike the current, operator-led regime, however, the number and type of customers affected, as well as the proportion who are subjected to secondary, and potentially more intrusive, checks will be available for inspection.

That is when racing may well need to build a case to government for special treatment, but do so on its own merits. An association now with a separate, highly politicised campaign against inheritance tax changes seems unlikely to add heft to the sport’s arguments if or when the time comes.