Yorkshire’s flat racing season is in full swing with meetings at Thirsk on Friday and York the following weekend. Horse racing sums up what makes this region tick; top-class sport, a tradition we are proud of, and a community that turns out together for one of the best occasions of the year.
Few things feel more English than an afternoon at York or Thirsk in the summer. There is the crowd around the paddock, the form guide tucked under your arm, and the small jolt of excitement that comes from sticking a fiver each-way on a horse you fancied simply because you liked its name. In North Yorkshire this has been part of ordinary life for generations.
All of that is now at risk. The threat does not come from the market or from people losing interest. It comes from a regulation being nodded through in Whitehall with very little fuss.
The Gambling Commission is about to approve what it calls Financial Risk Assessments; most of us know them as affordability checks. On the face of it, the idea seems fair. When I served as a minister in the last Government, I and my colleagues backed the principle of shielding the small number of people who are genuinely at risk while leaving everyone else free to have a bet. We were told the checks would be, to use the then minister’s phrase, “truly frictionless” – a quiet look at background data, with no hassle and no prying.
It has not turned out that way.
Someone who simply wants to put a few pounds on the 3.20 at Ripon is now being asked for bank statements, payslips and the kind of financial paperwork you would expect to provide for a mortgage. Plenty of people, quite reasonably, say no. And that is exactly where a well-meaning policy runs into the real world.
These punters do not stop betting. They take their money abroad instead, to unlicensed websites that offer no consumer protection, no safeguards for problem gamblers, and pay nothing into the Treasury or back into the sport.
The figures bear this out. Online betting on British racing has dropped by more than £2 billion since 2021. In the past year alone, visits to unlicensed betting sites jumped by over 500 per cent. The Betting and Gaming Council reckons another 70,000 customers could be pushed out of the regulated market if the checks go ahead as drafted. The Horserace Betting Levy, which channels betting money into the sport, is expected to drop by £13 million in a single year.
This is not some distant Westminster squabble. It lands squarely on rural Yorkshire.
British racing keeps more than 85,000 people in work and adds over £4 billion to the economy. Round here, courses like Thirsk are far more than sporting venues. They are the shop window for many local businesses, a mainstay of the hospitality trade, and somewhere communities come together.
The training yards at Malton, Norton and Middleham create work and trade for jockeys, stable staff, farriers, vets, caterers, groundsmen, hoteliers and taxi drivers, and every one of them relies on a healthy sport.
That supply chain reaches right into our market towns and villages. Damage racing and you damage all of them with it.
There is a principle at stake too. A flutter is not a vice that needs stamping out. It is a legal, taxed and regulated pastime that millions of perfectly ordinary people enjoy. Treating every punter as a problem gambler waiting to happen is condescending, illiberal and in the end counter-productive.
In her Budget, the Chancellor acknowledged how big the black-market problem has become and handed the Gambling Commission £26 million to deal with it. Yet that same Commission is now about to bring in rules that will push still more custom towards the very illegal sites the money is supposed to fight. You really could not make it up.
I have written to the Culture Secretary, Lisa Nandy, asking her to halt the rollout, publish a full account of how the pilot scheme actually performed, and sit down with the racing industry to find something sensible instead.
Through the new betting duty rate, the Government has already shown it grasps how much racing matters. Now it has to act on that.
Save our racing. Save our bets. And save the rural jobs and traditions that depend on them.
