Lord Allen's Burning Platform: Collaboration Without Conviction

Lord Allen's Gimcrack address—skillfully drawn out by Lydia Hislop's probing interview—contains a central paradox: it calls urgently for collaboration whilst offering no compelling vision of what racing should collaborate towards. The five Cs framework (convene, collaborate, commercialise, communicate, consumer) sounds comprehensive until you realise it describes processes rather than solutions, like prescribing "better coordination" for arterial bleeding. To Allen's credit, some observations are entirely correct. Racing does need better data utilisation, improved communication, and enhanced customer experience. These aren't controversial; they're necessary for any viable sports product. The problem isn't that Allen is entirely wrong—it's that he's right about the easy bits whilst missing the structural crisis entirely.

Collaboration as Strategy

Allen's repeated emphasis on collaboration—"how do we get this sector to positively collaborate together"—reveals both insight and evasion. Racing's fractured governance does impede effective decision-making. Better coordination could help. But collaboration towards what? This is where Allen's framework collapses into corporate platitudes. He calls for stakeholders to work together without articulating the strategic vision that should guide their efforts. It's the business equivalent of urging cavalry to charge without specifying the objective or even the direction.

Worse, this emphasis on collaboration contains a hidden danger: groupthink. When diverse stakeholders convene seeking harmony, the desire for consensus often suppresses necessary structural reforms. Without structured dissent—someone explicitly assigned to challenge assumptions—collaboration risks becoming collective delusion.

The critical questions Allen's "collaborate" phase must address but doesn't:

• Is the current fixture list commercially viable?

• Are bookmakers' interests fundamentally misaligned with racing's sustainability?

• Why are owners receiving inadequate returns on investment?

• Why are informed punters systematically excluded from legal betting?

These questions require answers before collaboration can be productive. Instead, Allen prescribes working together whilst avoiding the conflicts of interest that make genuine collaboration impossible.

The Customers Racing Forgot

Allen expresses shock that racing doesn't talk about consumers, creating a textbook straw man. The industry is saturated with debates about affordability checks, stake limits, and customer experience. But Allen's discussion of "customers and consumers" contains conspicuous omissions: owners and informed punters. Both groups have been systematically ostracised by the very bookmakers Allen wants "much better relationships" with.

Owners fund the horses, pay training fees, and subsidise the spectacle generating betting turnover. Their reward? Watching bookmakers exclude knowledgeable punters whose activity should fund prize money, whilst racing's leadership prioritises bookmaker interests over sustainable owner returns.

Informed punters—the sectional analysts, the sophisticated bettors who understand probabilistic reasoning—have been driven offshore through affordability checks, stake limits, and account restrictions. These should be racing's ideal customers: engaged, knowledgeable, generating consistent volume, creating efficient markets that attract recreational participants. Instead, bookmakers treat winning as evidence of problem gambling and exclude profitable accounts. Racing's leadership watches this happen and prescribes better collaboration with the entities doing the excluding. Allen's silence on this ostracism is deafening. You cannot claim to care about consumers whilst ignoring systematic exclusion of your two most critical customer groups.

The £80 Billion Misdirection

When Allen bemoans £80 billion going offshore to the "black economy," he commits critical statistical error. This global figure tells us nothing about UK-specific leakage from British racing. Unless he can demonstrate what proportion originates from UK bettors wagering on UK racing, the statistic is meaningless to Treasury tax take or racing's levy yield.

It's a red herring—suggesting massive opportunity where none may exist whilst distracting from the documented reality: informed UK punters migrate offshore because bookmakers systematically exclude winning accounts. This isn't speculation; it's observable fact. The same bookmakers Allen seeks to partner with have made it commercially impossible for sophisticated bettors to wager legally on British racing. You cannot simultaneously allow bookmakers to refuse service to knowledgeable punters, impose affordability checks assuming betting success indicates problem gambling, and wonder why sophisticated customers migrate to unregulated markets.

The Metrics That Don't Matter

Allen's focus on "bums on seats" reveals fundamental confusion about racing's revenue engine. In an era where primary revenue derives from off-course digital betting, what empirical evidence links physical attendance to levy and media rights income?

If the correlation is weak—and all evidence suggests it is—then the £4 million marketing investment represents misallocated capital. The focus on attendance metrics suggests leadership is optimising for the wrong variable entirely, like perfecting the restaurant's dining room whilst poisoning the food.

The £4 million "Going Is Good" campaign risks becoming a sunk cost fallacy if the underlying product remains defective. No amount of advertising remedies systematic exclusion of your most valuable customers.

What's Actually Burning

The platform isn't burning from lack of coordination or communication. It's burning because:

Regulatory Capture: The BHA prioritises protecting bookmakers' business models over racing's sustainability—a governance failure, not marketing problem.

Systematic Customer Exclusion: Both owners and informed punters have been marginalised. Owners subsidise a product from which bookmakers extract value whilst excluding the punters whose activity should fund prize money. Informed punters face restrictions assuming winning indicates pathology.

Perverse Incentives: Affordability checks designed to prevent problem gambling instead exclude profitable customers, reducing levy contributions and driving turnover offshore—achieving the opposite of their intended effect.

Misaligned Interests: Bookmakers profit from information asymmetry and excluding informed customers. Racing needs informed, engaged participants creating efficient markets. These interests are fundamentally incompatible. Allen's proposed solution? Collaborate more closely with entities causing the problem.

Why didn't Allen challenge racecourses on their abysmal changing room facilities? Owners invest hundreds of thousands annually to provide the product that generates racing's revenue, yet many courses offer jockeys' changing facilities that wouldn't pass muster at a provincial leisure centre. This isn't tangential to racing's crisis—it's symptomatic of an industry that takes its product suppliers for granted whilst wondering why they're increasingly reluctant to continue funding the spectacle. More fundamentally, why didn't Allen address the derisory offerings to owners? Prize money that fails to cover training fees. Hospitality that treats those funding the sport as afterthoughts rather than essential partners. Recognition programmes that amount to tokenism whilst bookmakers extract value from the product owners finance

Collaboration Without Conviction

Here lies Allen's central failure: he calls for industry-wide collaboration without articulating a vision compelling enough to justify the effort or strong enough to overcome entrenched interests. Traditional cavalry charges succeed not through perfect coordination but through shared conviction about the objective. Officers don't spend precious minutes ensuring every trooper agrees before engaging—they point at the target and charge. The momentum itself creates coordination.

Allen provides neither the clear objective nor the conviction to drive action. Instead, he offers process frameworks and calls for harmony amongst stakeholders with fundamentally misaligned interests. It's collaboration theatre—the appearance of strategic thinking without the substance.

This matters because racing's crisis demands difficult choices that will upset powerful constituencies. Bookmakers won't welcome policies requiring them to accept informed customers. The fixture list debate threatens racecourses' commercial interests. Meaningful reform requires leadership willing to identify winners and losers, not endless consultation seeking impossible consensus. Allen's approach guarantees paralysis disguised as stakeholder engagement.

What This Could Mean

Scenario One—Status Quo: Allen's five Cs join the graveyard of strategic initiatives that changed nothing. Racing continues prioritising bookmaker relationships over sustainability, marketing over product improvement, harmony over reform. Owners gradually withdraw as returns fail to justify costs. The platform burns whilst committees discuss fire protocols.

Scenario Two—Wake-Up Call: Stakeholders recognise Allen's framework as symptomatic of deeper governance failure, triggering forensic analysis of offshore leakage, policy review acknowledging informed punters as assets, regulatory reform prioritising racing's interests, and genuine engagement with owner economics. Revenue stabilisation becomes possible as policy aligns with reality.

Scenario Three—Quiet Collapse: Leadership continues optimising for wrong variables—attendance, bookmaker relationships, marketing spend—whilst the actual revenue engine dies. Owners reduce involvement. Informed punters cement offshore relationships. British racing becomes boutique heritage industry sustained by wealthy hobbyists rather than viable economics.

Conclusion: The Charge That Never Came

Lord Allen correctly identifies weaknesses in data utilisation, customer communication, and experience delivery. Credit to Lydia Hislop for extracting these commitments. These improvements matter. Racing should address them. But these are meaningless if racing continues excluding the two customer groups determining its economic viability: owners and informed punters. Allen's collaboration framework suffers fatal weakness: it calls for working together without articulating what racing should work towards. It's the vision without the conviction, the strategy without the strength—a call to cavalry charge without identifying the objective or even the direction.

Racing's existential crisis demands something Allen's address conspicuously lacks: diagnosis of the actual disease. Without acknowledging regulatory capture, systematic customer ostracism, and perverse incentives, leadership will keep prescribing aspirin for arterial bleeding. They'll perfect on-course experience whilst bookmakers exclude winning punters. They'll enhance data presentation whilst owners watch investments subsidise bookmaker profits with inadequate returns.

The platform burns. Allen has noticed the smoke and proposed sensible fire safety measures. What racing needs is someone willing to identify the arsonists—and explain why they're sitting on racing's board, why they systematically exclude owners and punters, and why leadership mistakes collaboration with these arsonists for strategic vision.

The five Cs describe processes. Racing's survival demands conviction