There are moments in British racing when the sport catches a glimpse of itself in the mirror and — briefly, beautifully — decides it does not entirely like what it sees. The joint paper published last month by William Derby of York and Adam Waterworth of Goodwood is such a moment. It arrives in the summer light with its elegant typography and its careful prose, two men of genuine standing putting their names (or their courses names) to something that actually says something — which in the context of British racing's governance history is roughly as remarkable as a clean bill of health from a vet at Lingfield on a wet Tuesday. You want to applaud. You also want to ask the rather rude questions the paper has decided, for reasons of its own, to leave entirely unanswered.
The Proposal at a Glance
The Derby-Waterworth paper — formally Governing British Racing, June 2026 — argues that the crisis is structural, not personal, and proposes:
Three specialist panels replace the Commercial Committee: Elite Flat, Foundation Flat and Jump. Each comprises three racecourse representatives, three horsemen and three BHA-nominated experts. One BHA expert chairs and holds a casting vote only; the other two carry standing votes alongside the racecourse and horsemen representatives. Panels debate and decide on fixtures, race planning, funding recommendations and product development within their division — they are not merely advisory.
An independent BHA Board arbitrates only on cross-divisional conflicts — funding splits, shared fixture slots, minimum values. Member Nominated Directors become individual practitioners, nominated by the RCA and Horsemen’s Group, not delegates carrying a mandate.
The RCA returns to trade body status, exiting fixtures and funding entirely. Racecourse representation on the panels is direct from the courses active at each level — the RCA plays no part in them.
A written mandate for the incoming BHA Chair agreed before appointment; a Vice Chair to be established for operational continuity through the reform period.
Racecourse shareholding weighted by contribution — prize money, attendance, quality of racing, betting turnover — rather than one-member-one-vote, and capped so no single ownership group can dominate however many courses it owns.
Immediate steps, the paper says, require no constitutional change. The RCA constitutional review reports in July. That is the stated deadline.
The accompanying covering letter adds a framing the paper itself does not carry: this is "not a finished answer, not a demand — it is a starting point we hope others will help shape and improve." The letter also invites "a conversation the whole sport should be part of." Both phrases deserve scrutiny. A starting point that arrives three weeks before the RCA's constitutional review deadline is making a demand whether it calls itself one or not. And this column has argued at some length that the word "collaboration" is British racing's primary anaesthetic — deployed whenever the sport wants to appear purposeful without doing anything that costs anyone anything. The letter uses exactly that language. Whether Derby and Waterworth mean it differently from their predecessors is the question only outcomes can answer.
Where Derby and Waterworth Are Right
The central insight — that tiers should attach to races and fixtures, not racecourses — is the kind of solution that looks obvious in retrospect and was, in practice, the stumbling block on which every previous tiering proposal fell. Goodwood and York stage Elite racing on some days, Foundation racing on others. No venue is demoted. The political temperature drops simply by reframing the question. It is precisely the thinking that separates a workable proposal from another consultancy document with handsome binding.
The practitioner MND model is similarly clean. RCA and Horsemen's Group each nominate one individual who sits on the board as a personal subject expert, not a delegate with a mandate. The fiduciary conflict that destroyed Lord Allen — who arrived with genuine conviction and departed six months later having discovered that conviction is not currency in British racing's governance — is at least partially resolved. These contributions deserve acknowledgement before the harder questions begin.
The Thing Nobody Is Naming
Here is what is conspicuously absent from six pages of otherwise precise and careful prose: the words Arena Racing Company.
This column's Great Fracture analysis in March described how ARC — sixteen racecourses, four of Britain's six all-weather tracks, a majority stake in The Racing Partnership — had become the fault line around which the governance crisis is actually organised. The five-course coalition that wrote to RCA chairman Wilf Walsh demanding formal reform was described as "a counter-bloc, not yet formalised, not yet funded." Derby and Waterworth's paper is that counter-bloc, now formalised. Their proposed shareholding reform, weighted by contribution, is transparently anti-ARC in substance on any honest arithmetic. Yet ARC is nowhere named.
This is a political calculation rather than an oversight. Name ARC and you hand their lawyers a line of argument, harden every defensive position, and transform a governance paper into a declaration of commercial war before the July review can be shaped. Understandable. But a reform document that cannot name the problem it is actually solving raises an immediate question about its authors' courage to implement the solution when naming becomes unavoidable — which it will, the moment the weighted shareholding lands on the RCA table and sixteen courses discover the arithmetic has been redesigned against them.
Note also what is absent from the authorship. Ascot — which departed the RCA in May 2026, the second crisis-trigger named in the paper's own opening paragraph — is not a co-signatory. Ascot was part of the five-course coalition that wrote to Wilf Walsh in February demanding governance reform. It is conspicuously not here. Whether this reflects a different strategic calculation, a different timeline, or a split within the coalition that no one is discussing publicly is not addressed. It should be.
How Much Does the Boat Need Rocking?
The paper's explicit position is that "immediate steps require no constitutional change." It is designed to achieve what is politically possible rather than what the crisis may actually demand. This is strategically rational — every previous attempt at transformational reform has stalled because it required unanimous consent from the very parties who benefit from inertia. By calibrating to convention changes rather than constitutional ones, Derby and Waterworth maximise their chance of achieving something rather than everything.
But here is the honest question: is the level of disruption this paper asks for commensurate with the level of crisis it describes? The Racing Innovation Group's Spring 2026 document argued for transformational change, not incremental tinkering. Betting turnover is down 19% in three years. One in three high-staking punters has migrated to unregulated sites. The horse population contracts by 1.5% annually. These are not the conditions that justify a proposal calibrated to avoid upsetting the people whose decisions created them.
The paper's authors would say — and they would be right — that transformational change that cannot clear the first political hurdle is worse than incremental change that can. Racing's history of perfect proposals that achieved nothing supports this view. But the risk runs in the other direction too: incremental change that does clear the hurdle, and is then treated as the destination rather than the first step, is British racing's most reliable historical outcome. The convention changes must not become the alibi for never doing the constitutional ones.
Virtue, Self-Interest and the Taxidermy Test
Goodwood and York are two of the sport's most commercially powerful heritage venues. Under contribution-weighted voting, they gain. Under one-member-one-vote, they are equal to Carlisle. The case for weighted voting is analytically sound regardless of who benefits — but a document that frames self-interest as structural virtue without acknowledging the alignment hands its opponents a gift they will not leave unopened.
Then there is the taxidermy test: something has died, and they have brushed its fur. The Commercial Committee is disbanded. Three specialist panels replace it, the same constituencies now debating in three rooms instead of one. Within each panel the conflicts are manageable. But the structural paralysis in British racing does not occur within product tiers. It occurs at precisely the level assigned to the BHA Board: funding allocation between divisions, media rights distribution, prize money split. The same arguments, wearing different lanyards, in front of a board whose written mandate specifies no enforcement mechanism for when a Chair decides to quietly file it.
What Is Missing
The punter. Total betting turnover per race has fallen 19% in three years. One in three high-staking punters uses unregulated sites. The black market processed an estimated £100 million on Boxing Day 2025 alone. The covering letter goes further than the paper's body text, naming "customer groups" alongside media and betting as a source for BHA-nominated panel experts. Credit for that. But "customer groups" in British racing's institutional language typically means spectators and participants — the people in the grandstand, not the people on the exchange. Structural representation for the constituency whose wagering funds the levy, the prize money, and ultimately the sport itself is not the same thing as a parenthetical reference to customer groups as one possible flavour of appointed expert. They must be in the room by design, not by implication.
The money. Core fixture betting turnover is down 14.4% year-on-year. Remote Gaming Duty rises to 40% this April. General Betting Duty climbs to 25% from April 2027. The levy review promised in the 2023 gambling white paper has not commenced. Three panels and a reformed board cannot arrest a financial deterioration this structural. The paper's silence on what runs in parallel is a silence the reformed board will confront from its first meeting.
The metrics. The Elite tier is set at "say 90" for illustration. Product segregation only functions if criteria are objective and consistently applied. Without published thresholds — field size averages, attendance levels, prize money floors, betting turnover data — "Elite" becomes a political category subject to exactly the negotiation the panels are meant to eliminate.
Eight Questions the Paper Must Answer
One: who determines the final weighting formula for reformed shareholding, by what process, and on what timeline? "A sensible combination, to be determined" is not a governance mechanism.
Two: what happens when the incoming Chair deviates from the written mandate? Who enforces it? A mandate without enforcement is a press release in better typography.
Three: what data will the panels operate on, and will it be published? Governance built on information asymmetry is not governance.
Four: is there a structural role for bettor representation, or is the entire betting layer managed through BHA-nominated experts whose appointment process is left unspecified?
Five: what is the parallel track on levy reform and media rights? If this is the governance stream, who owns the financial stream, and when do they converge?
Six: what is the sequencing of convention changes and shareholding reform? If the former arrive without the latter, British racing will have a more elegant version of the existing arrangement operating under the same constitutional constraints that made it dysfunctional.
Seven: how much disruption is this actually calibrated for? The paper asks for consensus from parties who have blocked every previous reform. At what point does the authors' admirable political realism become an accommodation to the forces that created the crisis in the first place?
Eight — and this is perhaps the most uncomfortable of all: is the BHA qualified or competent to curate this process? The paper asks that "the industry (BHA) curates a conversation around how we adopt agreed changes to the governance structure in a timely fashion" and that BHA-nominated experts populate the new panels. This is the same BHA whose board could not deliver reform under Lord Allen. Whose permanent CEO, as this column noted in March, changed nothing of structural consequence during his acting tenure. Whose interim chair is back for a second rotation as emergency prop. Who are these BHA-nominated experts, who decides them, and on what basis should an institution that has demonstrably failed at strategic leadership be trusted to handpick the people who will shape the new structure's character? The reform paper proposes to correct the BHA's governance by asking the BHA to govern the correction. There is a circularity here that deserves rather more than a line in the conclusions.
The Distance Remaining
There is a longer tradition in this sport of producing documents that almost save it. The 2003 Racing Review. Premier Racing. Reform proposals that stalled, in the paper's own words, "because they tried to achieve change through the very structures that make change impossible." Derby and Waterworth understand this history. Their paper is the most substantive contribution to the governance debate since Frankel winning at York, the work of two people who genuinely love the sport and want it better governed than it has been in living memory.
That is worth everything. And it is not quite enough.
The elephant is still in the room. It is wearing a panel badge now, standing quietly between the Elite Flat representatives and the BHA. I hope their proposal gets movement and change in a governance structure that has stagnated for too long.