what is required is one voice.

​If you ask the question to those who comprise horse racing’s ‘stakeholders’, as if anyone who loves the sport and is interested in its future are not a stakeholder, ‘how to address racing’s financial woes?’, you would receive at least ten different seemingly plausible paths out of the quagmire. Of course, and this may be stating ‘the bleeding obvious’, the problem is the concept of stakeholders, which in effect are semi-autonomous committees, none of which worries about being underneath the over-arching umbrella that is the B.H.A. when the rain sets in.
Horse racing needs a supremo, not someone appointed from ‘big business’ to run a body tasked with running a sport that is also an industry, someone who at every new appointment must run to catch-up, who has very little idea how the sport works and has even less idea of the nuances and funny little ways that have developed of their own accord since Queen Anne went for a carriage ride and came home to found Ascot racecourse.
Horse racing is an odd sport in that its heroes tend to have four legs and big teeth. I doubt if any head of the B.H.A. comes into the job with that perspective. If you ask someone on a quiz which team won the F.A. Cup in 1987 (no idea) and who scored the winning goal, the answer would be a football club and a football player. Or human, to put it more succinctly. Ask who won the 1987 Grand National and the answer would not be any of the following, though each one would be correct, Steve Knight (no relation, unfortunately) or Andrew Turnell or Mr. Jim Joel but Maori Venture. It is always the horse that comes first whether it is the Derby or a seller at Catterick. This sport is centred on horses. And they are not ‘stakeholders’, even though they take the greatest risks and too often pay the hardest price, and their opinions are never sought or heard.
‘Stakeholders’ only want what is best for them, though they all agree that general funding and prize money is the most pressing problem facing the sport. There is a simple, though perhaps complex, method to sort out the problem of prize money – some kind of ‘Tote Monopoly’ or system used in other countries like Australia, France, Hong Kong, etc. If the problem of funding could be resolved virtually every problem within the sport would fade away. You would think the B.H.A. would know this and would be stretching every sinew, burning the candle at both ends, to put in place the solution, whatever the solution might be? But you would be wrong to think it. I’m not even sure the B.H.A. has any cognisance of the problem. 
The sport is in desperate need an Admiral Rous or Lord George Bentinck or perhaps someone alive like Barry Hearn, someone who will listen, consider, rake-out the bad ideas, the bad practices, rationalise, consult and then draw-up a blueprint for the present and future financing of the sport. One man (or woman), with knowledge of the sport, prepared to listen and consult, yet brave enough to take bold decisions. The present system of governance is like watching frogs slowly coming to the boil in a pot on a range likely to run out of oil any moment.
The whip debate in this country got a good stirring back in the mid-eighties during the Cheltenham Festival when two Irish jockeys were brought to book for over-zealous use of the old attitude adjustor and here we are getting on for forty years and still we are embroiled in a whip debate. The consultations have gone on for decades; the rules have been tinkered with, number of strikes set and still the rumblings of discourse continue. Journalists at the Racing Post can always fill a quiet day with their thoughts and solutions on the whip and either its importance to the sport or it being the cause of horse racing having such a maligned image one might think the sport is run by a producer working on Panorama.
The B.H.A. should run the sport. The buck really should stop with them. The ‘stakeholders’ nonsense may be a good concept on paper but it allows the sport to appear like a ‘horse designed by a committee’, which is a camel, if you didn’t know. The B.H.A. is a meet and greet organisation that delegates responsibilities that they should grasp and as a result the B.H.A. and its board are reactive when the sport requires proactive governance.
One of the best initiatives in many a long year came about through someone at the B.H.A. taking a proactive decision to only allow jockeys to ride at one meeting a day, a forward-thinking step that has improved mental well-being amongst jockeys and allowed so many more jockeys to achieve a better standard of living. Yet this radical decision only came about because of the covid nonsense. One meeting a day rule was never considered prior to the scandal of covid, yet if the B.H.A. were more forward-thinking than they have ever been, or employed someone that actually knows the sport inside out, suicides and substance abuse within the sport might have been avoided.
The problems shackling horse racing are the B.H.A. and its ‘stakeholders’. One governing voice, that is the solution.