Spectator, The: A question of gambling

A well-known northern trainer was telephoned one day by an owner who had been doing rather well in business and decided to expand his racing interests. `I'd like to get another four-year-old hurdler,' he declared. `I've got just the fellow for you,' said his delighted trainer. `He's just in from Ireland - about 10,000.' The reply wasn't quite what he had been expecting. `I'd actually been thinking of spending around 20,000,' said the owner. `Oh, that was only for a half share, of course,' said the quick-thinking trainer. 'I suppose I could let you have him all to yourself.'

Some trainers may be slow-speaking but most are quick enough on their feet, and they have to be to survive. I know enough successful trainers to envy their lifestyle and enough struggling ones to realise that it is a nerve-wracking business which would have most of us in the care of the men in white coats with fat pill bottles by the end of a single season. And if politicians have been defined as the people who tell lies to journalists and believe what they read, then trainers could be called the people who tell lies to journalists and hope the bookies will believe what they read.

At the lower end of the scale, the landing of a few successful bets is the only way of balancing the books in many smaller yards, as I was reminded when I saw the conclusions of Sir Alan Budd's Gambling Review Body report. The 176 recommendations in the 250-page report mostly make a great deal of sense. It is a ridiculous anomaly that gambling debts are not currently recoverable at law, and if the government accepts the report's conclusions that will be remedied. It is equally silly that betting shops cannot advertise their locations or sell snacks to keep ravenous punters going in the intervals between races, two restrictions which the Budd team advises should be swept away. (I foresee a new career beckoning for the bold-punting Sir Clement Freud as culinary adviser to some of the bigger chains.) It will be sensible too to have a single regulatory body for all forms of gambling and to have more thorough investigation of those who apply for bookmakers' licences.

What Sir Alan calls the committee's `deliberately cautious approach' has largely provided just what a review body should: better protection for the vulnerable young, greater consistency and simplification in regulation, and increased choice for adults to pursue their chosen pleasures. With three months of consultation to come before the government pronounces, the right note was struck, too, by the new culture secretary, Tessa Jowell, who conceded that current gambling laws were complex and out of date and `fail to reflect the extent to which gambling has become an everyday part of the way millions of people spend their leisure'.

At first sight I would quibble with only two areas of the Budd recommendations. The report came down against betting being allowed in pubs and clubs, to my mind a false distinction when anybody can use his mobile phone in the pub to phone through a bet to the company operating the betting shop next door. Of course gambling can cause social problems, but there is no evidence that those problems are any worse in countries where you can have a bet in civilised surroundings and don't have to slink down some side alley and behind a plastic curtain to do so in a haze of cigarette smoke, like the clients of some North African bordello. The mixing of alcohol and betting which worried the Budd team does, after all, occur on every racecourse daily.

Sir Alan and his colleagues suggested, too, that the Jockey Club should consider banning trainers from betting. Jockeys, of course, already face dire penalties for betting and I can see the logic behind the Budd recommendation. The report argues that close links between trainers and bookmakers, with trainers being given better odds on their horses than those available to the general public, can be compared to insider trading in the City. Such links, it suggests, result in unfair access to information and I suppose that is undeniable. But many trainers depend on betting to survive. Several might not have built their businesses in the first place without winning the money to do so.

Toby Balding told the Independent that he had wagered 300 on his horse New World in the Portland Handicap at 33-1 more than 40 years ago, picking up more than ten grand. That would have paid for a few boxes in those days. Lambourn's Barry Hills famously picked up the money to buy Keith Piggott's yard and start as a trainer after a hefty gamble on Frankincense in the Lincoln at prices from 66-1 down when he was head lad in a Newmarket stable. With trainers already quitting at a pretty alarming rate, I fear that removal of that particular prop to the uncertain world of prize money percentages and getting tricksy owners to pay their bills could be the loosened brick which sees the dam wall breached and a flood of them getting out of the game. Either that or trainer betting would go underground, which would be unlikely to help anyone.