Even a heavyweight needs a team around them

Friday’s fiasco: when the race never gets started

Lord Allen of Kensington arrived at the British Horseracing Authority (the BHA) on 1 September 2025 with a single, non-negotiable condition: the board must become fully independent, stripping out the member-nominated directors who had turned governance into a turf war between racecourses and horsemen for decades. The board agreed. There is no evidence the member bodies ratified it. By 24 February 2026, less than six months into the role, the Racing Post's industry editor was reporting that Allen's future was "in grave doubt." He is the BHA’s fifth chair in under a decade. 

To understand why, you need to understand the BHA's structure. It is a company limited by guarantee with four member bodies: the Racecourse Association on one side, and the Racehorse Owners Association, Thoroughbred Breeders' Association, and Licensed Personnel on the other. Each side holds equal voting weight, and any amendment to the BHA's constitution requires unanimous consent from all four they can withhold any time, for any reason. There is no independent regulator sitting above the BHA with powers to intervene. The Government has oversight via the Department for Culture Media & Sport, Parliament can scrutinise via select committees, but nobody can force the members to give their consent.

The near-term trigger for Allen's downfall was raceday data rights. This is information the BHA collects as regulator (off-times, going changes, non-runners) that racecourse-owned media companies package with live pictures and sell to bookmakers for north of £150 million a year. The current arrangement, under which the BHA provides this data for a nominal fee, expires in 2028. Allen wanted the BHA to commercialise it. In February 2026, under racecourse pressure, he dropped the proposal. His climbdown was intended to unlock the broader reform process. Instead, it detonated it. Participant representatives immediately questioned whether he should continue and have called for his resignation.

More damaging still, BHA has had an acting CEO for fourteen months, and an interim chair for seven months before Allen arrived. A leadership vacuum so normalised that nobody even remarks on it any more. Brant Dunshea publicly said in December 2025 that he wants the permanent role; a statement no acting CEO should ever have to make. When your top leader has to campaign for their own job while trying to do it, every decision they make carries an asterisk. The retention risk isn't at the top. Is seeping through the organisation as the crisis continues to unfold in slow motion.

What makes this maddening is that everyone agrees racing is in crisis. Sky Sports reported that a gambling tax harmonisation threat prompted the first voluntary cancellation of all racing in modern history on 10 September 2025. The British foal crop has fallen 37% from its 2008 peak. Prize money lags behind international competitors. When the Racing Post sent detailed questions to every stakeholder group asking them to explain their positions on the governance standoff, not a single official response came back.

The BHA is not a wealthy organisation absorbing this from a position of strength. Group turnover in 2023 was £41.8m, against outgoings of £39.7m; a surplus measured in hundreds of thousands, not millions. Betting turnover is falling, horse numbers are contracting, and the BHA's own quarterly reports flag serious questions about what size of fixture list will be sustainable in the years ahead. Prolonged governance failure is not just an embarrassment, it represents significant financial risk. The cost of inaction is already evident.

If the BHA and its warring member bodies asked us for our straight-talking advice, we'd apply our Organisational Repair Index™ to quantify the damage. Based on what is publicly known, the indicative picture is this:

BHA is an organisation that has been in acute distress for years and has treated each crisis as an isolated incident rather than evidence of systemic relational damage. The unanimity requirement has functioned as a structural enabler of exactly that avoidance; any single body can halt reform, so no member has to confront its own role in the breakdown. Trust has effectively collapsed at institutional level. Co-ordination across the organisation’s internal and external stakeholders is failing visibly. Stakeholder confidence has left the building. Delivery capability is sub par as no decisions can be made. 

The WayFinders Method informs how we would help the BHA repair:

Acknowledge that this is a multi-party relational breakdown that has been institutionalised over decades; and acknowledge that accountability sits with each of the four member bodies, because they could have resolved this at any point simply by dropping the unanimity requirement. 

Apologise to the trainers, stable staff, and jockeys whose livelihoods depend on a sport whose governance has failed them. 

Accountability means not blaming the Chair or the acting CEO for how this has unfolded, and taking steps to own the damage created by committing to amends. 

Amends starts with one concrete action: separate the data rights negotiation from governance reform entirely. Appoint an independent commercial mediator for the former, give the latter a fixed timeline with binding arbitration built in, and hire a permanent CEO. It’s surprising the BHA board aren’t begging Lord Allen to stay and see this mess through because finding a sixth chair is not a strategy. 

No organisation can function effectively with an acting chief executive expected to drive through permanent reforms before his future is settled, and a chair who is being led back to the stables before the race has been run. The unanimity requirement means that no single body ever has to own the damage; the trainers, stable staff, and jockeys have to live with the consequences of this governance failure without redress.

For the BHA, repair cannot come fast enough. 

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