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The Horsemen's Group Chairman Paul Dixon has written to the Racing Post concerning criticism from the Racecourse Association about the amendments to prize-money tariffs.

Here is his letter...

It was disappointing that Stephen Atkin, of the Racecourse Association, chose to react negatively to the simplification of the tariff bands announced recently by the Horsemen’s Group.

The changes – made almost exactly a year after the tariffs were first announced – seem self-evidently commercially sensible for both racecourses and horsemen.

Rather than being asked to put up the same level of prize-money on a Friday as on a Saturday we have accepted that, although the standard of racing is often better on a Friday than midweek, the racecourses’ revenues do not always increase significantly as a result. Friday prize-money can now, therefore, mirror midweek, rather than Saturday tariffs.

Conversely, the commercial reality faced by our members – owners and trainers in particular – is that going racing on a Sunday is more expensive than midweek, owing to increased staff costs.

Remember, Sunday racing was originally promised, by racecourses, to bring top-class, well-funded meetings. To make it commercially viable for horsemen, prize-money needs to be higher than midweek.

If, as Mr Atkin suggests, this will make some Sunday race meetings uneconomic for racecourses, then that should mean fewer Sunday race meetings, rather than the prospect of our members subsidising a product that too often serves neither punter, racegoer nor horsemen.

There are other points raised by Mr Atkin that I would like to address.

He says that the timing of the announcement is wrong, as we are halfway through the jumps season. Of course, the reality is that with 52 weeks of racing and overlapping seasons there is never a hiatus to announce these things.

He also claims, rather cheekily, that the RCA has “agreed to invest £3.2 million in higher-grade races through the Quality Support Fund”.

Quite apart from the fact that this issue has nothing to do with rebanded tariffs, the Horsemen’s Group proposed the QSF successfully to the Levy Board to combat the so-called “dumbing down” of race programmes by some of Mr Atkin’s members last year.

This, therefore, is the Levy Board investing money raised from bookmakers into a quality racing idea proposed by the Horsemen’s Group.

The truth, therefore, is the converse of what Mr Atkin says. Racecourses, far from “investing in the QSF”, will instead be bidding to get the fund to invest in them.

The way they will have to do this is by putting up sufficient of their own prize-money to convince the BHA and the horsemen that their races deserve to be supported with further QSF money.

Paul Dixon, Chairman, Horsemen’s Group

12 February 2012