The biggest bet in horseracing?

The long-standing debate about how to fund horseracing has been in the news again recently. The Daily Telegraph today summarises the problems facing the industry, with the Government determined to disentangle itself from the annual debate over the horseracing levy - the statutory mechanism through which Britain's bookmakers have funded the racing industry for the past 40 years. �For successive ministers, brokering the annual deal between the bookies and the industry has proved as bruising as falling off a thoroughbred. Looking for an alternative is the task of Lord Donoughue, who was charged 18 months ago with the complex task of removing the government from the negotiating table and getting the industry to stand on its own feet. Obvious solutions are for the industry to find new income streams from the sales of rights. However, some think that William Hill's successful challenge to the BHB's plans to charge bookmakers for using the data it claimed it owned on runners and riders might scupper this. Lord Donoughue still wants the levy to go one day. "When we get a British Horseracing Authority, one of its objectives should be to explore legally robust ways of exploiting commercial revenues of some sort."

Frontier (London) advises GG Media.