To the board and executive of the British Horseracing Authority,

The Chancellor had barely sat down on Wednesday before your statement was out on X, and within hours your chief executive was on At The Races explaining why a five-point rise in machine duty spelled trouble for the sport. Had the fruit machine hired an agent, it could not have bought quicker representation. The cause was a curious one: not the racehorse, not the punter, but the terminal in the corner of the betting shop with the stool bolted to the floor. So I put a plain question to the chief executive, the chair and everyone around the table: how did the sport of kings end up as the machine's character witness?

Fairness first. The present team inherited a sport with no central funding model and a strategic drift a generation older than any of its members' tenure, and last autumn your Axe the Racing Tax campaign held racing's duty at 15 per cent while other online betting heads to 25. Nobody sensible blames you for the rot in the joists.

But an inheritance is not an alibi; it is a brief. You are the sport's regulator as well as its commercial custodian, and no body in racing should understand better that a sport survives only as long as its customers trust it.

The man in the stand

Let me introduce someone you asked for help last year. When you launched your campaign, your chief executive said it was vital that bettors "fully support and promote" it, and he did. He buys the Racing Post and argues with its ratings over breakfast, pays for a form service, watches from the first at Lingfield to the last at Wolverhampton, and goes to his local course monthly whatever February throws at him.

He has loved this game for forty or fifty years.

He stood with you. Who has since stood with him? He has been asked for bank details to justify a modest bet, made to prove where he lives – some report standing outside their own front doors to do it – and handed terms with all the warmth of a parking notice.

If he wins, his account is restricted for the offence of reading the form, a novel way to treat a valued customer.

Ask why and he reaches no person, only an automated email regretting any inconvenience, signed by nobody. Forty years of loyalty, and not the respect of a human reply.

When the fund stops

You know better than most that without punters there is no levy and no media-rights deal, whether the bet is struck with a bookmaker, through a pool or on an exchange.

When I started watching racing, it made up 70 per cent or more of what was bet in the betting shops; today it is barely 9 per cent of what Britain spends on gambling. Some of that is cultural change, but it does not help when the caretaker rushes to protect the very products that undermined the sport we love.

Our man has watched the margins widen – Gambling Commission figures show the margin on online racing up from 9.5 to 10.8 per cent in one year – while the levy rate stays put and turnover falls. A fixed slice of a shrinking cake, taken from customers being driven out of the bakery, is not a funding model.

The posters tell punters to stop when the fun stops. You should be asking what happens when the fund stops for many of those punters who want to remain loyal but are struggling. They have not fallen out of love; they feel ignored by the body meant to run their sport, and they noticed whom it sprang to defend on Wednesday.

Hostages to fortune

Let us be clear: many operators whose shops you now defend imposed those restrictions themselves. They will say they are managing risk and obeying the regulator, and some of that is true, but in my view the rules have also proved convenient cover for commercial decisions. No restriction email was ever delayed by a consultation.

They have restricted winners and widened margins while the shop floor steered customers towards the machines.

Racing still lends its biggest days to firms that restrict winners – bet365, William Hill and Unibet among them. Taking their sponsorship and levy is one thing; a partner need not be a friend.

Lending your voice to protect the machines that helped get racing into this hole is a step too far.

This is not new, which is rather the point. When the government proposed cutting the maximum terminal stake to £2, Nick Rust, the BHA's chief executive at the time, warned that racing's gains could be undone at a stroke, and Martin Cruddace of ARC forecast up to 3,000 closures and a £55 million hit.

The stake was cut in 2019, shops closed, and the levy still went on to a record because the money had moved online. On Wednesday you reached for the same script with a near-identical £57 million.

Year by year racing tied more income to products it does not own, cannot price and now must defend. That is a hostage to fortune, and a hostage who wants to be free should first stop speaking up for the captor.

Three reasons not to love the slots

The first is arithmetic. Your chief executive said the rise "will make somewhere near 40 per cent of shops loss-making." The operator now keeps 75 pence of each pound the machines take rather than 80, a fall of about six per cent in one revenue line. Fixed costs magnify such a fall, as any bookmaker will tell you, but if it sinks four shops in ten the estate was already on oxygen, and you have been recruited to campaign for the cylinder.

Nor does the £57 million, a forecast for four years hence, survive much handling. A racing punter whose shop shuts does not retire to the allotment; he bets online, where the levy is also paid. Presumably that is why the Betting and Gaming Council's consultants, EY, put the hit nearer £15 million.

The second is the trend. Shops have fallen from roughly 9,000 at their peak, when the machines still took £100 a spin, to 5,825 by March 2025, while the levy rose from £65 million in 2016-17 to £108 million in 2024-25. Pinning racing's case to a shrinking estate is backing a horse the vet has seen.

The third is your own brand. You won last year's argument by persuading the Chancellor that racing is a cultural asset. That case thins each time the same body defends a product taxed precisely because government associates it with harm.

The books nobody can read

Ask what the levy yields from a fixture, or what media-rights deals are worth, and you are told it is commercially confidential, a position the Levy Board has obligingly adopted on the bookmakers' behalf. You speak of transparency, yet you cannot tell an owner what a wet Tuesday at Southwell earns from betting, then pleads with the Treasury on the strength of a guess.

A plan, not a plea

This letter speaks for punters, but the same reckoning awaits owners, breeders, trainers and everyone who loves the sport, all funded, at one remove, by the man in the stand. Lose him and the direction of travel guarantees long-term decline, however many shops are saved. I am not cheering a cut to anyone's prize money; they deserve a funding base that does not wobble whenever a Chancellor glances at a roulette terminal.

So here, respectfully, is what you could do.

First, put healthy distance between racing and the bookmakers' other products, and argue for racing on its own merits, never again as a passenger on the machines.

Second, publish the income map, levy by fixture and media-rights values included, with a five-year target to cut shop dependency.

Third, own the relationship with the bettor: a racing-led pool, fair terms on the exchanges and a punters' charter, winners included.

Fourth, open the door to the punters, small owners and analysts on racing's edges, who have better ideas than many of the last twenty years. They are not members of the self-preservation society or chasing a quick buck, and without them the sport has no future.

To the man in the stand

A word, too, to the restricted. Be careful whom you bet with, because the firm taking your money may well be the one that restricts you, closes your account or mines your data for its own ends.

Look very carefully, too, at the names on the sponsors' boards, the trainers' silks and the jockeys' breeches. The firm whose logo rides in the big race may be the same one that has just cut your stake to pennies, and every pound you hand it is a vote for how it treats you.

And spare a thought for those who have given up and gone to the black market. Most are not villains; they are people who were checked, restricted and shown the door by the licensed firms, and who still wanted a bet on a horse. They deserve sympathy rather than scorn, though they have swapped one bad deal for a worse one, with no protection for their money and no levy for the sport they love. Every one of them is a customer racing failed to keep.

True friends

Racing needs true and loyal friends. It does not need those who steer it with a chequebook, or who warn of dire consequences whenever it declines to link arms with them. In my view the sport has let itself be captured by interests whose loyalty runs no further than their balance sheets, and the friend who only ever arrives with a cheque is not a friend but a creditor.

Racing never meant to be the lucky charm dangling from a slot machine; it drifted there cheque by cheque. The people around your table have the chance to take the charm down, put the sport back on the horse, and give the man with the Racing Post under his arm a reason to stay.

Yours, in hope rather than despair,

A Neglected Punter (Who loves our sport)