Horse Racing Levy

Robin Walker Excerpts

Thursday 20th January 2011 Commons Chamber

[Mr Robin Walker (Worcester) (Con)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for West Suffolk (Matthew Hancock) on securing the debate and I support the many excellent points that he and other hon. Members made. I thank him particularly for mentioning Worcester. I am fortunate to have in my constituency one of England’s best-loved racecourses and to represent one of the few cities to have a racecourse right at its heart. Members of a literary bent will be interested to know that it recently featured heavily in Jilly Cooper’s blockbuster, “Jump!”

The Pitchcroft racecourse in Worcester has seen racing for more than 200 years and provides vital green space at the centre of the city. It is one of the many wonderful things about Worcester that the city is rich in green spaces—not just formal parks but woodland, playing fields, the prettiest cricket ground in England and one of its finest racecourses. As the Member of Parliament for Worcester, I have vowed to protect those green spaces, and ensuring our racecourse remains viable is an important part of that.

[Mr Graham Stuart (Beverley and Holderness) (Con)]

My hon. Friend’s inspirational words about green spaces take me to the Beverley Westwood, which has been protected by the pasture masters of Beverley for hundreds of years and prevented from being developed, and in it sits the famous Beverley racecourse. So, like him, I wish to see the racing industry and our racecourses maintained for the benefit of the environment and the economy of the areas in which we live.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Walker]

My hon. Friend makes an excellent point.

Like other Members, I feel I should declare a non-declarable interest at this point, because although I have no personal connection with either the racing or the betting industry, my sister worked for many years as a groom and horse exerciser for a race yard in Shropshire. Being horse mad, a competitive spirit and one of life’s natural risk-takers, she relished the opportunity to work with difficult horses and became a specialist in retraining some of the most challenging, not to say dangerous, horses in racing. Like many people in the industry, she worked for very low wages to pursue a passion. That passion is shared by many of my constituents who enjoy a day at the races at Pitchcroft and make the most of the public amenity provided by the racecourse.

Meetings at Worcester regularly attract up to 3,000 race-goers and are popular with local residents as well as visitors from miles around. On Derby day, Pitchcroft can attract crowds of up to 7,000. That brings business to the city, with people shopping and dining out after their day’s racing, and can be a major economic boost for Worcester. The course provides not only racing, but an important venue for meetings, conferences, Worcester’s annual Campaign for Real Ale beer festival, and many charitable events. However, all this is under threat for two reasons. The first, which is beyond ministerial control, is the power and might of the River Severn. The second is the decline in the levy.

Confident as I am in the Minister’s powers, I would not ask him, Canute-like, to turn back the waters of the River Severn. However, I would ask him to take note of the special circumstances in which it places Worcester’s racecourse. The very fact that it is on the floodplain is perhaps what has protected this green space in the heart of the city from development, but it also brings its challenges. Most years, there is some flooding of the course, and that can lead to cancelled races and days lost. However, in the summer of 2007, when Worcester was struck by its worst floods in decades, the racecourse was submerged under feet of water for many weeks. Major flooding of this sort has made plans to upgrade facilities and a one-time plan to invest in a course-side hotel unviable, and has posed a major financial headache for the course’s management. As a result, Worcester is probably more dependent than many other racecourses on the money it receives via the levy to make racing sustainable and to attract trainers with prize money.

It is tragic, therefore, that this course of all courses should have suffered the biggest single cut in levy funding of any course in the country. The £300,000 reduction this year in Worcester’s levy funding for prize money represents not merely the average 38% cut, nor the 61% cut that one of my hon. Friends mentioned, but a massive 68% cut in the funding from the levy board, and poses a significant risk to the long-term financial viability of the course and the many trainers, stables and jobs that it supports. In a period where racing attendances have been higher, and where the overall betting on British horse racing has remained strong, it seems extraordinary that we should see such cuts, and for a racecourse as popular and well attended as Worcester, for all its challenges, it seems deeply unfair.

Horse Racing UK has set out a four-step programme that it believes could replace over £100 million of revenue lost by the levy board. My ambition is more simple: to stem the sharp decline that has seen the levy yield almost halve since 2004, and Worcester suffer even more. Clearly there is a challenge for racecourse owners and managers to make up revenue in other ways as well—commercialising pictures and using the opportunities presented by the internet to grow their own revenues—but it is reasonable that the betting industry should pay its fair share. I urge the Minister, as he looks into these matters, to ensure that there is a system in place to make all bookmakers pay their fair share for the benefits that racing brings them. I note the cross-party interest that we have heard during this debate in the idea of a racing right. Any solution should take into account the need to maintain a diversity of courses in different locations around the country, to support those courses, such as Worcester, where racing has taken place for generations, and which support a wide network of racing stables, and to rebuild a healthier relationship between the gambling and the racing industries.

I share with the Secretary of State the disappointment that he has expressed that these two industries were unable to agree a mutually beneficial settlement this year, and I applaud his belief in free markets and his intention to remove Government intervention from the process. However, I would urge both the Secretary of State and the Minister, who will be looking at a new system of funding, to come up with solutions that take account of both the challenges and the opportunities of an online world, and make racing viable, not just for this year, but for hundreds of years to come.