Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Laurence Robertson and Sam Gyimah

Monday 20th July 2015 Commons Chamber

[Mr Gyimah]

My hon. Friend makes an excellent point. It is unfair that a primary pupil eligible for free school meals in Richmond receives £472 extra funding while a similar student in another part of Yorkshire receives almost £300 more. That is why we recently announced that the schools block funding rates for 2016-17 have been baked in the extra funding that we distributed in the last financial year to make funding fairer.

[Mr Robertson]

I welcome the fact that the Government are about to introduce a national funding formula, but may I urge the Minister to do it sooner rather than later, because the longer the unfairness goes on the more difficult it will be to correct?

[Mr Gyimah]

I know the f40 group, of which my hon. Friend is a member, has been campaigning for 19 years for a fairer funding formula, so I can understand his impatience. He is right to highlight the financial pressures that schools are under, especially those in underfunded parts of the country; this is one of the reasons why we are committed to fairer funding. As I said, we have protected per pupil funding in each authority from 2015-16, meeting the commitment to protect the national schools budget.

Horse Racing Levy

Debate between Laurence Robertson and Sam Gyimah

Thursday 20th January 2011 Commons Chamber

[Mr Laurence Robertson (Tewkesbury) (Con)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for West Suffolk (Matthew Hancock) on securing this debate and on how he introduced it. He made some extremely good points. I would like to declare two non-declarable interests as it were: first, I am joint chairman of the all-party group on racing and bloodstock industries, which is one of the most active and influential—we like to think—groups in Parliament. Secondly, I have the honour of representing Cheltenham race course, and so I take slight issue with his assertion that Newmarket is the centre of world racing. I readily acknowledge that it is a fantastic establishment and the home of flat racing, but I would suggest that Cheltenham is the home of national hunt racing.

My hon. Friend is right to draw attention to the dangerous situation with regard to prize money. It is not a matter of rich owners becoming richer; it is a matter of enabling all owners to continue to own race horses and to race them at the right standard and at the right level. He also pointed out that the important part of the debate is the knock-on effects on stable staff, jockeys and trainers—all the people who are not well paid but who should be able to continue to carry out their essential work. Take them out and the whole sport collapses. That is why prize money is so important, and my hon. Friend is absolutely correct to point out that in many races owners would lose out even if they won. If a horse is at the lower levels of racing—the lower levels are extremely important—they would have to win possibly eight or nine races a season just to break even, and that would be in a good year. However, no horse is going to do that, so he is absolutely right to point out the problem.

The current situation is paradoxical, because as my hon. Friend also pointed out, we have the most tremendous racing in this country—indeed, probably the best in the world. In just a few weeks’ time, we will have the great Cheltenham festival, which is surely the greatest racing festival in the world. We can also boast the grand national shortly after, and then Royal Ascot, and the York week in August—absolutely tremendous racing that is not bettered anywhere in the world—and yet we also have this financial problem. If seems that the two situations should not go together, but they do. Racing has continued to exist because of the generosity—or, as my hon. Friend the Member for Shipley (Philip Davies) said earlier from a sedentary position, the stupidity—of some owners, who have continued to lose money. It would be rather complacent of racing to accept that this situation will continue indefinitely, because I do not think that it will.

[Mr Gyimah]

Does my hon. Friend agree that one of the problems with not having a stable funding base for racing is the underbelly of racing? A lot of people are attracted to racing out of their passion for it, but there is so little funding available that many live on low incomes, with a lot of suicides among people who want to become jockeys but do not make it. Racing is not just for the wealthy: there is an underbelly of racing, and to resolve that we need a stable funding base for racing as a whole.

[Mr Robertson]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. It is not just winning the Cheltenham gold cup that is important. Horses do not start off running in the gold cup; they start off running in point-to-point races, before building up to races where the prize money is perhaps less than £2,000. My hon. Friend is also absolutely right about all the people involved in that. We cannot lose those feeder tracks or what I would describe as feeder racing.

We therefore have a problem, and I have reluctantly come to the view that the levy is an outdated system that has to be replaced. We have the problems of falling prize money, and owners running horses and not getting back a third of what they put in even when they are placed. All those problems exist under the present system, so the present system cannot be right. I have long felt that the existence of the levy does at least two things. First, it divides the people of racing. When I say “the people of racing”, I include the bookmakers, because many bookmakers, whether they are chief executives or work for Ladbrokes or Hill’s, are also racing people. However, each and every year, the levy negotiations serve to divide those people. We end up with this gratuitous violence, from one side to the other, which does racing no good. We saw what can be achieved when the whole of racing got together—for once—to promote Tony McCoy, who became BBC sports personality of the year, a much-deserved award. That is racing getting together—it is racing at its best—but the levy has served to divide it, each and every year.

The second thing that the existence of the levy has done is to allow racing not to address the need to find alternative funding as urgently as it might have done. There are alternative funding mechanisms and routes for money to come in; for instance, media rights is one way, while sponsorship is another. Racecourses take money from the public, and from sponsorship and hospitality. My hon. Friend the Member for Shipley was absolutely right to say that there might be a better income stream for racing from those sources in future. In 2004, when this House passed legislation to abolish the levy, it was not enacted—I understand that it is still on the statute book and can be enacted by a statutory instrument. At that time, there were negotiations and discussions on the then British Horseracing Board’s ability to sell its data rights to bookmakers in order to get money for racing.

That option was seen as a possible way forward. However, at that time, the European Union, being the wonderful organisation that it is, decided that this could not happen. It is now time to revisit that opinion, as expressed by the European Union—and, for the benefit of those reading this in Hansard, I was being sarcastic when I described it as a “wonderful organisation”. That decision has to be revisited, because I see a need to replace the levy. I have thought long and hard about this, and I think that the Minister probably ought to announce that the statutory levy will end in, let us say, three years’ time. That would give racing the opportunity to forge new relationships and develop new income streams, in the knowledge that the levy will no longer be there after a certain point. Setting a date will concentrate people’s minds, so that they have to come up with other funding mechanisms.