Chairman's Blog: It costs nothing to look - unless you're an owner

It is 11am. The phone rings and it is a call from the yard.  

An entry has been identified for your pride and joy and then come the fateful words, “Just to take a look”. 

I wish those words were preceded by the proviso, “It will cost you fifty quid in BHA fees regardless of whether we run or not”, but that is never the case. Possibly trainers just assume that we know that every  entry has a significant cost  that is borne solely by the owner. In 2025, entry handling fees amounted to £4.9 million, almost the same as BHA registration fees. Tax setters never lose out. 

Over and above the handling fee costs, owners put £26m into the prize-money pot in 2025 via entries and declarations. According to the available data, around 80% of  that comes back in the way of prize- money to winning and  placed connections, while the remaining 20% is distributed to trainers, jockeys and stable staff. 

Since joining the ROA Board in 2023, entry fees have been a bugbear of mine, especially multiple entries that rack up significant costs for owners. The legitimate  argument is made by trainers  that  multiple entries given them the opportunity of  finding the ‘easiest’ race for  our prized possessions. That  might well be true, but it also has an unfortunate downside that I will come to below.

At my first Board meeting, I raised the issue about what was to my mind the ridiculous cost of UK entry fees. I was assured that, as part of the Racing Digital project, it had been agreed to lower the handling fee to £10, a substantial reduction. Of course, we are still waiting for the introduction of Racing Digital, although I am hopeful the wait is almost over. 

However, if we assume that the handling fee reduction will save us around £3.9m per year, we would still have contributed £26m to our own prize-money, about 14% of the total, plus another million to the BHA. 

In Hong Kong, where I did most of my racing over the last 30 years, the entry fee for a Class 5 race (the equivalent of a 0-50 in the UK) is HK$2,625, or around £250. That is more than we pay here for a Class 5 or 6 race, but bear in mind that the total prize pot for a Class 5 Hong Kong race is HK$875,000 (£83,000). That amounts to 0.3% of prize-money per entry. For a £7,500 race in the UK, the equivalent entry fee would be £22.50. Owners are lucky if they get much change back from £90 and half of that is the handling fee. Hong Kong is a special case, but UK entry and declaration fees are an outrage. 

Let’s get back to the multiple entries issue. Apart from running up the costs to owners – and directly benefitting the regulator and racecourses – there is another counterproductive outcome. What trainers are doing is looking for the easiest race i.e., often the one with the fewest runners. Who among us doesn’t like that? 

Yet those small-field races have a downside: they act as evidence that there is too much racing in the UK and feed the drive to reduce the number of fixtures. As I argued in my Leader column two months  ago, fewer fixtures equals less races and less prize-money opportunities for us. 

Why do the small fields have such an effect? Because the BHA has set an arbitrary average field size target for Flat and jumps racing. The more races run with small fields, the lower the average is and, in some eyes, the stronger the argument to cull the fixture list. 

You will have noticed, I hope, the key word in this argument – average. When averages are used in complex industries like horseracing, they end up with unintended consequences. Reducing fixtures to  produce some hoped for increase in average field size is just warped logic. If field size is the key performance indicator then the BHA needs to look at which disciplines, which classes and which distances produce the lowest number of runners. 

Blanket reductions in fixtures serves no one’s best interest. Finding a formula to increase declarations – like penalising those horses entered but not declared, thus giving them bottom priority to run in their next declared race – would be a more sensible approach (horses declared but balloted out could be given priority to run next time). That way we might produce a clearer picture of where field size problems arise and what in the programme needs to be trimmed. 

It would stop us wasting our money on multiple entries too.