Op-Ed: Synonymous With Greats, Kempton is Braced for Extinction

[Wandering Eyes]

Each Christmas, Kempton hosts the most important day of jump racing in the British calendar outside the Cheltenham and Aintree Festivals. It's a racecourse synonymous with the great names of this sport – Kauto Star, Desert Orchid, Wayward Lad, One Man.

Yet Friday's compelling edition of the King George VI Chase crouches under extinction's peak – and we've learned it's been huddled in that brace position for the past seven years due to the wilful actions of its owners, the Jockey Club.

Most people thought any immediate threat to Kempton, caused by the Club putting the whole site forward for redevelopment to Spelthorne Borough Council in January 2017, had elapsed. That proposal was triggered by changes to Britain's national planning policy, enabling previously developed land to be considered within green-belt submissions.

When news hit the press 11 months later that the site had been categorised as “strongly performing” in the green belt, bulldozers appeared stood down. Of course, we weren't naïve enough to imagine the subject wouldn't ever be raised again. We heard the persistent rumours.

But we didn't realise the implosion could be inescapably sparked at any point in the subsequent decade via further favourable change to planning law. The Jockey Club had however already set the mechanism. 

Our misunderstanding was permitted to perpetuate. An announcement from then chief steward Sandy Dudgeon in February 2020 stated: “We have now put forward another option alongside the original full site for their consideration. This would involve just a proportion of the available land there and allow Jump and All-Weather Flat racing to continue.” (My underlining.)

At the time, this news was received as the racecourse having been “saved”. This article in The Sun is typical. The Jockey Club would have seen how their statement was interpreted and did nothing to provide the full context, even though the words I've underlined – read with the understanding we now possess – implicitly acknowledged the original proposal remained live but dormant.

Yet this wasn't known for a fact until June of this year, when exclusively revealed by the same newspaper's Jack Keene.

External factors, initiated by a property company with no interest in the sport's future, will now determine whether – in its owner's words – this “highly profitable racecourse” will be consigned to history

Despite the scale and intensity of outcry about Kempton's proposed sale in early 2017, the following September, the Jockey Club signed what amounts to a 12-year option with developers Redrow to build houses on all or part of the site. The obliteration of the racecourse can thereby be sparked at any time, in effect until 2030.

When Dudgeon spoke, the Jockey Club believed the existing planning landscape allowed little hope for its original proposal. Viewed from our perspective, however, its 2020 announcement misleads by omission.

External factors, initiated by a property company with no interest in the sport's future, will now determine whether – in its owner's words – this “highly profitable racecourse” will be consigned to history. And that's the element rightly angering so many.

In the summer of 2022, still no version of the Kempton submissions appeared in Spelthorne's draft Local Plan. To this day local residential opposition endures. Yet the world is changed. Labour's manifesto included an ambition to build 1.5m homes in five years. Their planning and infrastructure bill received Royal assent last Thursday.

 

Five-time King George winner Kauto Star and Ruby Walsh | Racingfotos

 

Kempton's future seems likely to rest on what remains of local powers to object. Whilst Spelthorne Council reiterated its opposition to development on “strategically important green belt” in recent days, in April 2027 it will be submerged in the new West Surrey unitary authority. Policy change could easily follow.

The terms of the agreement between the Jockey Club and Redrow would also need to be met. It is reasonable to surmise those T&Cs might have been updated since September 2018 – commonplace with such options – and not least since Labour won its landslide victory in July last year.

A minimum-value clause would always have been necessary. It's not outlandish to suppose there was some sort of condition, at least originally, relating to guaranteed planning permission for a replacement all-weather track in Newmarket. The FAQs accompanying the original announcement stated the Club would “require” this proposed new racecourse “to be operational before racing stopped at Kempton Park”.

It is surely therefore significant that “presentations to Jockey Club members and various racing stakeholders around the proposed new racecourse, which would be situated on the large expanse of land behind the grandstands at the Rowley Mile” were delivered in May, again according to Keene.

This Newmarket-centric retrospective divide-and-conquer strategy is effective. Some Flat trainers based there welcomed their own future transport and staffing costs tumbling. No surprise therefore to witness British racing's most vocal and influential figures all quiet over there, despite the potential loss of a swathe of gallops and disruption while construction takes place.

Meanwhile, if you're a Flat trainer based in the west or south, your costs conversely soar – and you don't already have Chelmsford down the road, as those in Newmarket do. In already hard times, it is no exaggeration to suggest some businesses may fail or else be forced to relocate.

If you're a Jumps trainer, bad luck but you'll always have Cheltenham and Aintree. Last weekend, amid what has felt like a rollercoaster Club communications strategy, new chief executive Jim Mullen outlined his vision. He hinted at an imminent deal to finance capital investment at those flagship tracks but also inevitable job losses across the group.

This came days after his Epsom team unveiled an exciting £6m investment in 2026 for their Flat-racing jewel, the Derby. But it took a question from the Racing Post's Bill Barber to prompt the assertion: “Kempton is out of my hands.” As Mullen's June appointment post-dated all known machinations, he was washing them of responsibility.

“Post the investment, when you go to Aintree and Cheltenham you should be able to see the difference,” he declared. “It will bring a better experience, which will be up there with some of the best sporting experiences in the UK.”

Shame there will be less to see when you get there. Kempton is unique among British Grade One Jump courses in its ability to provide viable ground on which trainers would choose to run high-class horses in the depths of winter – which climate-change experts say are becoming warmer and wetter.

Hosting the King George VI Chase at Sandown, or Aintree (or Ascot, in the unlikely event it's sold) would make that race more like the following day's Welsh National at Chepstow and less like the Savills Chase at Leopardstown. This critical nuance is still undervalued or inadequately understood by the Jockey Club.

For Jump racing the closure of Kempton risks both fatally undermining customer demand for the British road to Cheltenham and Aintree and further nudging the supply dial in favour of Ireland

Such a King George is far less likely to be on the agenda of a genuine Gold Cup contender. Ditto a Ryanair hopeful. Ditto a relocated Christmas Hurdle for a putative Champion Hurdler, or a relocated Kauto Star or Wayward Lad for a Festival-bound novice chaser. If Britain's best horses run in fewer numbers over Christmas, fans will vote with their feet and wagering apps. Attendances and betting turnover will fall further. This spiral heads only one way.

Ireland already outperforms Britain in terms of the proportion of high-quality Jump horses each country currently trains – a trend that's merely slowed at best, according to Timeform data. British-based investors are increasingly choosing to deploy their horses in Ireland, where the overheads for training are cheaper to boot.

In short, for Jump racing the closure of Kempton risks both fatally undermining customer demand for the British road to Cheltenham and Aintree and further nudging the supply dial in favour of Ireland. This from a racecourse group whose business model heavily relies on the continuing success of the Festival and Grand National. Go figure. Yet when we question the accountability of its processes, we get a patrician pat on the head.

“I have always been a huge advocate for the Jockey Club and what it does, so any decisions we have made have always been in the best interests of racing,” Paul Fisher, its chief executive from 2017 to 2020, said only this week. That's “any decisions”, folks.

Such quasi-religious zeal necessarily involves the Club marking its own homework. The terms of its Royal Charter require it to “act in the long-term good of British racing in everything we do”. Who defines what's in “the long-term good of British racing”? The Jockey Club, stupid.

Bar Boxing Day, for many Kempton is a soulless track whose worth equates to driving betting turnover and media rights. Attendances at such meetings are nearly non-existent – a fact surely connected with how awful the customer experience is.

Yet it is close to the M25 and has its own train station, 40 minutes from Waterloo, connecting it to the largest (or second largest, depending on your measure) city in Europe. There is a strong argument the track is unloved because the Jockey Club simply didn't work hard enough on basics like engaging the local community or after-work crowd. They did once run a horserace to music, though.

Did external stakeholder consultation take place prior to the 2017 announcement, given the impact Kempton's closure will have on contingent businesses? Given the widespread shock generated, I doubt it.

Was any attempt made to quantify, via commercial analysis, the steadily accreting long-term impact on British Jump racing? This in terms of high-quality, Festival-bound horses at the key customer-driving, narrative-generating period of Christmas? In terms of developing nascent high-quality jumpers season-round? And in influencing British owner decisions on where to patriate their investments? We don't know. The sport should demand to see it, if it exists.

Back in 2017, things appeared more positive for British Jump racing than they are now (though the cracks were starting to show). This returns us to the folly of the Jockey Club having tied its own hands over Kempton until 2028 at least, with no knowledge of the headwinds to come.

What's left to do? The serfs – including vocal critics Nicky Henderson, Paul Nicholls and Alan King – must make our democratic voices heard in the arena of whatever remains of Britain's planning process, if the time comes when Redrow exercises its 2018 option. For those not prepared to allow the linchpin of British Jump racing to be removed without fight, frustratingly it's all we can do.

If the worst happens and the racecourse is lost, the Club must consult on how and where the money is spent. Back in 2017, the “minimum figure” from the sale was posited as “in excess of £100m” and expected to be “significantly higher… [depending on] a number of factors including how much land is used for housing”.

“Every penny of this will be reinvested in the sport,” its communications repeatedly trumpeted. But whose sport? Jump racing would suffer the body blow. Those who still value it should prepare to rail against the money raised being used to cross-subsidise all-weather Flat racing.

What about the Jockey Club itself, whose Executive is mostly very different from 2017, but whose nine-strong Board is elected from fewer than 200 enduring invited members “appointed on account of their contribution to horseracing”? How can we know it won't again be this furtive and high-handed in its decision-making processes?

The Club drew much praise in 2023 for backing away from its notion to expand to five days the Cheltenham Festival after receiving widespread negative feedback during a consultation process. Its thoughtful changes to the Festival's race programme last year were developed collaboratively. In recent years, its behaviour as a key industry stakeholder has been more reliably consistent with ambitions to maintain and grow quality racing in Britain.

When Baroness Dido Harding became Senior Steward last July, she spoke of the need to “listen and learn”. What the sport needs now is further reassurance it won't be wrongfooted, patronised and let down again.

 

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