Brant Dunshea, the chief regulatory officer of the British Horseracing Authority, is set to assume the role of "acting" chief executive starting from 1 January. This comes as the search for a permanent replacement for Julie Harrington, who has been in the position since January 2021, continues. Dunshea has been closely involved with key issues and initiatives within the sport since joining the authority in March 2015, including a comprehensive review of Cheltenham's Festival meeting in 2018 where six horses suffered fatal injuries and consistent efforts to tighten the rules regarding the use of the whip.

Key Developments and Challenges

The British Horseracing Authority announced Dunshea's new role on Tuesday. Simultaneously, the search for Harrington's permanent successor has been postponed to enable the newly appointed chair, Lord Allen of Kensington, who will take over from Joe Saumarez Smith in May, to participate in the recruitment process. This delay is understandable, yet it also highlights the urgency of finding a new chief executive.Six months have passed since the start of the search, and the list of concerns facing the incoming chief executive has only grown. Bookies contribute a percentage of their racing bet profits back to the sport through the Levy mechanism. The possibility of reforming this system to boost one of the sport's main income streams seems as distant as ever. Meanwhile, the latest official industry statistics from the Gambling Commission, published last week, show a continuous and worrying decline in betting turnover on the sport. This decline, which extends to the end of March 2024, is particularly concerning when viewed against the slow but steady implementation of affordability checks for punters as part of the previous government's gambling regulation reforms.

Media Briefing and Ongoing Negotiations

At a media briefing arranged by the British Horseracing Authority on Tuesday, there was little concrete progress on the Levy reform issue. A voluntary agreement between racing and betting operators seemed imminent in May but was put on hold due to Rishi Sunak's unexpected decision to call an election. The gambling side has been reluctant to re-engage as they await the shape of the new government's regulatory regime around gambling.However, there were some mildly positive developments. Greg Swift, the BHA's director of communications, reported that "senior representatives from the BHA will be meeting senior representatives of the Betting and Gaming Council next week to resume those conversations," seemingly at the request of Baroness Twycross, the gambling minister. But the resumption of talks is unlikely to be accelerated by the government's decision to proceed with the previous government's plan for a £100m-a-year levy on the gambling industry to fund prevention and treatment of gambling-related harm. Bookmakers may argue that the landscape has changed, times are tougher, and now is not the time to give up even a small portion of their turnover to meet racing's demands for additional funds.

General Gambling Landscape and Future Outlook

In a broader sense, there is little indication of any willingness in the government to move away from its predecessors' reluctance to separate general betting, especially betting on racing, from more dangerous online slot and gaming products that have initially soured the public's perception of gambling.The stalled negotiations on Levy reform against a backdrop of declining betting turnover present a challenging start for any incoming chief executive. The impending arrival of affordability checks proposed in the previous government's white paper on gambling legislation adds to the complexity. Additionally, the much-anticipated arrival of Premier Racing at the beginning of this year has had little impact on metrics or the overall mood so far.It is crucial to distinguish between the imminent checks, which are intended to be "frictionless" in most cases, and the more intrusive checks instigated by bookmakers that have been causing problems for punters in the past couple of years. There is no clarity on the criteria that individual firms use to determine which punters to check. The fact that revenues from online slots and casino games remain strong is at least anecdotal evidence that racing and betting businesses have received excessive attention."The key number on betting turnover is a decline of £1.5bn in two years," Swift said on Tuesday. "I think it's important to remind people that when the white paper was published and we conducted our own independent analysis of the potential impact [of the new checks], it was significantly higher than the government's estimates. Our view was that it could potentially result in a £50m hit, equivalent to one in seven jobs in the sport being lost.The results of the first phase of the [Gambling Commission's] pilot tests of the check should be available early in the new year, and we know that the second phase is already underway. These findings must be independently reviewed and subjected to rigorous evaluation to fully understand the potential implications of these checks."Several members of the all-party parliamentary group on gambling reform, which played a key role in introducing the checks, have stated that they have no intention of harming racing and that the checks aim to curb the harm caused by online casino games and slot machines. However, the Gambling Commission remains reluctant to meaningfully separate betting from gaming, and convincing it to reconsider is likely to be a key mission for the BHA's next full-time CEO from day one. This makes one wonder why anyone would be interested in taking on this challenging role.