Racing Chiefs warn job plans for bets can cost tens of millions of costs Greg Wood

BRant Dunshea, the acting chief executive of the British horse-racing authority, warned Tuesday that government proposals to harmonize the rates for online gambling and gaming products in casino-style could cost tens of millions of pounds annually, each stimulus would remove gambling companies to gamble.

Dunshea said that Racing’s administrative body was ‘deeply delivered’ by the planned harmonization, which was initially driven in November 2023 by the former Chancellor of the Treasury, Jeremy Hunt.

However, the idea has not expired with the last government, and the treasury is currently Carry out a consultation process About the principle of a harmonized duty percentage. Remote (online) gambling device (RBD), about racing and other sports, is currently levied as 15% of the gross profit of an operator, while the speed of external gaming obligation (RGD), for products such as online slot machines and casino games, is 21%.

The consultation, which runs until July 21, does not propose a rate for a uniform external gambling and gaming obligation (RBGD), but it is unlikely that it is lower than the current 21% level of RGD.

“Operators are our already cross sales of our [racing] Customers about accidental games, “said Dunshea Tuesday,” and we know, and there is academic research to support this, that the potential for gambling damage is greater in those environments around online casinos and slots.

“We are concerned that this will encourage operators to reduce their focus on our product, it would bet on racing more expensive for them to operate, and would also reduce the customer’s stimuli, promotions, and so on. This would stimulate this [punters to] Go away from the regulated markets to the illegal markets, to look for competitive prices and offers. “

Dunshea said that the BHA had ordered the independent modeling of the likely impact of a uniform rate at both 21% and 30%.

“The analysis suggests that an increase from 15% to 21% to harmonizing with RGD would have an impact of around £ 40 million a year,” said Dunshea. “If you model it to consider once harmonized, that would be considerable. With 30%it would be around £ 90 million a year.”

The intervention of Dunshea on Tuesday followed a meeting last week to discuss the proposed harmonization, which was attended by BHA leaders, civil servants of the Treasury, directors of large deliveries and members of parliament with interest in gambling issues.

The meeting was convened by James Noyes, a senior researcher at the Social Market Foundation (SMF) Thinktank, who last year coordinated a report that concluded that the gap between RBD and RGD should be increased considerably in order to reflect the enormous rise of online slaving and harmful forms of the potential, many of the potential gulked as one of the past. The Noyes report suggested that RGD should at least be doubled to 42%, with RBD left unchanged by 15%.

Gaming is essentially a mechanical process, supported by basic mathematics. The gross profit of the operator is a fixed, unchanging function of the turnover. Betting, racing or something else, includes thought and skills, and the opportunities – and the margin of the operator – are fluent. It requires considerable efforts – on both sides of the endless battle between Bookie and Punter – to have it paid.

Racing now has a unique close relationship with gambling between large sports. The newest estimate of the BHA of the total annual contribution to the British economy was £ 4.1 billion. The 85,000 employees whose jobs are directly or indirectly dependent on racing all pay tax and national insurance, and spending their wages in local economies, and in particular national economies, up and down through the country.

The most important effort that is needed when gaming, on the other hand, includes finding new ways to pack the boring, attritional, click-click clicking process to separate players from their money, something for a while.

Dunshea’s comments on Tuesday, such as the upcoming official response from the BHA to the Treasury Consult, are only on racing racing, but still represent a big step forward from the days that the sport was used to, for example, and looked open as £ 100-a-spin machines in the Course Gokken in the Course Gokkenkers in the Course Gokkenkens Course stores were in the Course stores in the Course stores in the course that were open in the course.

In a preface of the document that has launched his consultation, James Murray, secretary of the treasury, suggested that a single duty “would create a simpler, streamlined system that is easier for operators to navigate”. In the meantime, the introduction to the document itself clearly states that “gambling tax should reflect the reality of the gambling industry.”

So what is it? A fundamental reality of the gambling industry is that gambling and gaming are fundamentally different things, and the tax regime about gambling has always reflected that fact.

The treasury does not (presumably) do not want to cause irreparable damage to one of the most popular spectators sports in the country and an industry with great economic benefits for the UK. However, there is no more certain way to evoke the law of unintended consequences than to impose simplicity on something that is complex for a reason.