The Rulebook and the Regulatory Framework
The BHA publishes and enforces the Rules of Racing, which run to several hundred pages and cover every operational aspect of the sport – eligibility rules for horses, jockeys, trainers and owners, the conduct of races, the handicapping system, the medication and anti-doping framework, the stewards’ powers, the appeals process, and the integrity provisions. The rulebook is the technical foundation of the regulatory framework and it is updated periodically to reflect changes in the sport’s operational practice, advances in veterinary science, and developments in the wider regulatory environment for animal welfare and sporting integrity.
The BHA’s regulatory authority over the sport derives partly from statutory provisions – most notably the Horseracing Betting Levy Act 1969 and a number of subsequent statutory instruments – and partly from the contractual relationship between the BHA and the licensed participants in the sport. Trainers, jockeys, racecourses and owners hold BHA licences or registrations as a condition of participating in British racing, and the licence terms incorporate the Rules of Racing as binding obligations. The contractual route to regulatory authority is the standard model for sports governing bodies in the UK, and it gives the BHA the operational reach to enforce the rulebook across the sport’s whole participant base.
The regulatory framework is not just about the in-running conduct of races. The BHA’s veterinary and welfare arm is responsible for the medication framework that governs what substances horses can and cannot have in their systems on race day, the post-race testing programme that enforces the medication rules, the welfare standards that apply to horses in training and in racing, and the equine fatality review processes that have substantially tightened over the last decade. The veterinary and welfare functions are operationally large and have grown in prominence as the public conversation about racing welfare has intensified.
The BHA’s regulatory work also covers the racecourse-licensing framework – every British racecourse holds a BHA licence that sets out the operational standards the course must meet to host racing, including the standards for the running rail, the watering and going-management systems, the medical and veterinary facilities, and the integrity infrastructure. The licensing framework is the operational backbone that makes the sport’s whole on-course operation work to a consistent regulatory standard, and the BHA’s racecourse-inspection teams are responsible for the ongoing supervision of the framework.
Integrity, the Stewards’ Room and the Disciplinary Panel
The most public-facing part of the BHA’s work is the integrity function, which covers the stewards’ room operations on race day, the wider integrity-investigation work that runs in the background, and the formal disciplinary panel that handles serious cases. The integrity function is the BHA’s response to the constant pressure that betting-related corruption places on a sport where individual horses and individual rides can move large amounts of money in the betting markets.
The stewards’ room is the first line of integrity defence. Every British race meeting operates under a panel of three stewards – typically two lay stewards and one professional stipendiary steward – who watch each race, review the running, and adjudicate on objections, enquiries and apparent breaches of the running rules. The stewards have the power to amend the finishing order, to fine or suspend jockeys for breaches of the riding rules, to refer cases upwards to the disciplinary panel for more serious breaches, and to require trainers and jockeys to attend an enquiry on the day. The stewards’ decisions on the day are operationally final unless successfully appealed, and the appeals process is the route through which contested decisions reach the formal disciplinary panel.
The BHA’s wider integrity work runs behind the on-course stewards. The integrity team monitors betting markets for unusual patterns, investigates intelligence reports from operators and from within the sport, maintains liaison with the police on criminal investigations, and runs the BHA’s whistleblower line that receives reports of suspected misconduct. The work covers the full range of integrity threats – race-fixing, the misuse of inside information, doping, betting in breach of the rules by participants, and the wider misconduct that the contractual licensing framework gives the BHA jurisdiction to investigate. The integrity function operates with a small specialist staff and draws on the wider regulatory infrastructure that the British sports-integrity environment has built up over the last fifteen years.
The disciplinary panel is the BHA’s formal adjudicatory body for serious cases that exceed the stewards’ room powers. The panel sits in High Holborn and operates with quasi-judicial procedure – written charges, formal hearings, legal representation for the parties, evidence in chief and cross-examination, and reasoned written judgements that are published on the BHA website. The panel’s sanctions range from cautions and fines through to long suspensions and outright bans from the sport, with the most severe sanctions typically imposed for race-fixing and the misuse of inside information. The published judgements form a body of regulatory precedent that shapes the interpretation of the Rules of Racing and the operational expectations on participants.
The Fixture List and the Two-Tier Reform
If you want to understand where the BHA’s regulatory work meets the commercial reality of British racing, look at the fixture list. The fixture list is the calendar of every meeting scheduled to take place at every British racecourse in a given year, and it is the operational document that determines when each course can host racing, what type of racing it can host, and how the sport’s annual programme of around fifteen hundred fixtures is distributed across the calendar. The fixture list is constructed by the BHA’s fixture committee in collaboration with the racecourses, the broadcasters, the betting operators, and the wider stakeholders, and the process is one of the most politically loaded operational activities in British racing.
The 2024-2025 fixture-list overhaul introduced the Premier and Core tier system, which represented the most significant structural change to the British racing calendar in a generation. The Premier tier covers the highest-quality fixtures with the largest prize-money pots, the strongest media exposure, and the most generous broadcast slots – typically the Saturday flagship meetings, the major festival days, and the Sunday Premier fixtures that the reform introduced as a deliberate broadcast counterweight to weekend football. The Core tier covers the wider midweek programme of standard fixtures that provide the operational backbone of British racing – the Tuesday and Wednesday cards at the smaller courses, the all-weather midweek programme, and the wider summer evening programme.
The economic logic of the two-tier system is that the Premier tier concentrates the sport’s commercial firepower on the fixtures that can sustain higher prize-money pots and command stronger broadcast exposure, while the Core tier provides the operational volume that the sport’s wider participant base requires. The reform was contested on the way through and the early results have been mixed. The Q1 2025 Quarterly Racing Report – which I come to in the next section – showed Core fixture betting turnover down 14.4% year-on-year, while the Premier fixture turnover was broadly flat. The Q3 2025 update showed total turnover down 4.2% year-on-year against the same period in 2024.
The fixture-tier reform is the most consequential commercial decision the BHA has taken in recent years and the operational debate about whether the structure is delivering the right outcomes is ongoing. The two-tier structure and its implications for the betting calendar are explored in more detail in how the BHA’s Premier and Core fixture tiers split British racing.
The Quarterly Racing Report and the Turnover Decline
The Quarterly Racing Report is the BHA’s own operational dashboard for the state of the sport and it has become the central source of evidence on the betting-turnover trends that have dominated the British racing conversation through 2025. The Report covers betting turnover, prize money, field sizes, attendance, foal crop, and a range of other operational indicators, and it is published on a quarterly cadence with each instalment focused on a recent reporting period.
The Q1 2025 Report – published in May 2025 – was the instalment that crystallised the depth of the turnover decline. Richard Wayman, the BHA’s Director of Racing, framed the findings in the Report’s covering commentary: “Total betting turnover has fallen by nine per cent compared with the same period in 2024. Whilst there is work to be done on the racing product to grow its appeal as a betting medium, there would be a much wider range of factors contributing to this concerning decline.” The framing – direct, calibrated, and acknowledging both the product issues and the wider drivers – set the tone for the rest of the year’s commentary on the turnover question.
The wider factors that Wayman alluded to are the structural pressures that have been compressing the British betting market for several years – the affordability framework’s effect on high-stakes punters, the migration of turnover to the offshore market, the FOBT-driven contraction of the high-street estate, and the wider competitive pressure from non-racing betting products. The Q3 2025 update showed the rate of decline easing to 4.2% year-on-year, suggesting that some of the worst of the Q1 pressure had moderated, but the structural questions about the racing product’s longer-term betting appeal remain open and the BHA’s commentary in subsequent Reports has continued to engage with them.
The Quarterly Racing Report has become a useful public good for everyone in and around British racing – it gives the racecourses, the operators, the trainers, the owners, and the wider stakeholders a common evidence base for the conversation about the sport’s commercial direction. The BHA’s willingness to publish the difficult numbers alongside the favourable ones is part of what makes the regulator’s role in the sport’s wider commercial debate operationally credible, and it is one of the quieter regulatory innovations of the post-2024 period.
