Levy Board breaks new ground with three-year business plan detailing spending

A three-year business plan has been published by the Levy Board for the first time to offer enhanced transparency on the body’s spending, which routinely reaches up to £100 million a year.

The publication includes 26 planned projects for British racing up to and including 2025 falling into four categories: generating interest in racing, employment, high-quality care and support, and enhancing the sport’s reputation.

Alan Delmonte, Levy Board chief executive, said outlining the goals for the money distributed by the organisation and giving a broader, long-term view of the projects it is going towards, should allow for its overall performance to be measured more openly.

“We are very pleased to publish the business plan,” he said. “It is a further commitment by the Horserace Betting Levy Board to transparency in our operation and we will regularly provide an update on performance against the plan.

“The HBLB is a small but busy organisation which has a significant reach, with its collection and distribution of £90m-£100m a year involving close working relationships with the racing and betting industries.”

The Levy Board’s plans had originally been approved in April last year, with publication held off until Thursday while the ongoing impact of the coronavirus pandemic was assessed.

The agreement on which projects would receive Levy Board backing was also made prior to racing’s leaders coming together to work on an overarching industry strategy, which is due to be formalised this year following a change in the sport’s governance structure at the end of 2022.

As such, Delmonte said the Levy Board would be in a position to work with changes for the sport that come out of the industry strategy, including around areas such as how to most effectively deploy prize-money to support the racing programme.

On prize-money, the organisation is set to continue working with racing’s leaders around the “optimum use of levy funds on Saturdays, bank holidays and through the development of the race-by-race funding mechanism”.

Delmonte said: “The business plan sets out in one place the key areas of activity and focus that we have identified for the period ahead, recognising as always that there will be new items that arise that we will address with racing, betting and government.”

Among the key performance indicators listed by the Levy Board are increasing the number of owners, horses in training, spectators at fixtures and betting turnover with regulated bookmakers, in addition to broadening diversity and improving “racing’s favourability perception rating”.

Plans for beyond this year include the review of the funding model for integrity in British racing, an assessment of potential areas to improve the relationship between betting and racing and the publication of a further business plan reaching to 2028.

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