Racing’s ruling body, having spent the summer fretting about not having enough friends and wailing that nobody loves it, will be feeling better about itself on Friday morning. Christopher Quinlan QC has proved a good friend, offering encouragement, reassurance and a gentle but firm shove in the right direction.
The good friend’s task, when faced with spiralling angst, is to effect meaningful change without appearing to do so, which might further damage the subject’s self-esteem. Even if half the wardrobe is to be chucked, the original buyer’s good taste must be praised.
“I have firmly concluded that the disciplinary system should not be, and in reality is not, in crisis,” the barrister wrote in his review, published on Thursday. “I encountered dedicated, quality, able people, deeply knowledgeable about horse racing at every level and part of the disciplinary system.”
This is significant support coming from a man whose biography records that he is a judicial officer for World Rugby and chairs disciplinary panels at the FA. On the other hand, those able people have not yet perfected their system, which is why Quinlan has produced 24 recommendations for change and 151 pages of analysis, including several moments where his meaning, however diplomatically expressed, is clearly: “This is not right.”
His first act on joining the review team appears to have been to ask Adam Brickell and Jamie Stier to step down from it, both men having so much responsibility for disciplinary matters at the BHA that it ought to have been obvious they could not be involved in an independent study. He then talks to “a good number” of BHA folk. “I sense, if I may say so, an acceptance among the majority that the disciplinary system can be improved.”
In the disciplinary panel’s terms of reference he finds an instruction that it must be led by the BHA board. “It appears to permit the board unfettered right or power to guide the panel on policy ... or even in relation to a specific case.” He finds no evidence that this has ever happened and recommends the words be excised forthwith.
He points out the “tension” in Stier’s role, responsible for the stewarding team but also for the disciplinary panel that often reviews stewards’ decisions. Then he asks about the appointment system for the panel, which is where his eyebrows creep to their highest point.
“This gap in my knowledge was shared by many of my consultees, some of whom I might have expected to know,” he remarks, frostily. He finds no set procedure for the appointment of the two lawyers who have served as panel chairmen for 11 years, nor any document explaining when and why racecourse stewards were given a judicial role on the panel. In the Quinlan-designed future there will be more lawyers but no stewards.
Those who remain on the panel will have security of tenure, Quinlan having removed the BHA’s right to fire them at three months’ notice, except in cases of misconduct. “I am not suggesting that the BHA would, for example, remove a member simply because it disagreed with a decision,” he says. But the mischief might be done if a panellist merely feared that could happen.
In the most gentlemanly way, Quinlan urges future panels to criticise the BHA where appropriate, a thing from which panels have so far shrunk. “A disciplinary tribunal would not wish to be perceived as partial,” he writes. “Making proper comment, including criticising a party or person or procedure ... helps to prevent any incorrect perception.”
What is missing is any general insistence on openness as a guiding principle. Quinlan does not call for publication of the minutes of disciplinary panel meetings nor for outside observers to be admitted. He does not ask that media access to BHA hearings be extended beyond ‘running and riding’ cases.
Still there is hope for a much better system if his review is implemented in full. The question now is whether the BHA can continue to make good decisions after Quinlan has left the building.
