BRITISH RACING TARGETS LIFETIME TRACEABILITY IN NEW FIVE-YEAR WELFARE STRATEGY

British racing has set itself the goal of knowing where every Thoroughbred bred for the sport is throughout its entire life, after the independent Horse Welfare Board unveiled its new five-year welfare strategy at a parliamentary reception in Westminster on Tuesday evening.

The British Horseracing Horse Welfare Strategy 2027–2031 follows on from 'A Life Well Lived', the sport's first industry-wide welfare plan published in 2020. It lists 20 priorities grouped under four headline outcomes: Quality of Life, Safety, Lifetime Responsibility and Trust.

Tracking horses from foal to retirement

Traceability sits at the heart of the plan. Racing already accounts for every horse while it is in training and running, but the board wants that visibility extended to cover a horse's whole life, from birth through to retirement and any second career. Planned measures include better data on horses leaving racing, wider use of digital vaccination records, more data sharing with other equestrian disciplines and an overhaul of core systems such as the General Stud Book. The board has also signalled it will lobby government if new legislation is needed to close the gaps.

Board chair Baroness Minette Batters put it simply in the BHA's announcement: to take lifetime responsibility, "we need to know where they are."

Safety work moves beyond the racecourse

The strategy also widens the focus on injury prevention to the training yard, with the aim of gathering much richer information on medication, gallop surfaces, workloads and breaks in training. Artificial intelligence, gait analysis and wearable technology will be explored as ways of spotting risk before it leads to injury. The BHA's James Given indicated that moving medication records online from pen and paper would be a central plank, acknowledging the change will not please everyone.

Retraining of Racehorses, the sport's official aftercare charity, published its own five-year plan on the same day and will continue to lead on aftercare. Its chair David Thorpe warned the Racing Post that if the sport fails on this front, "we should all fear for the future of British racing."

BHA chief executive Brant Dunshea said the strategy reflected the principle that the sport is accountable for every horse it breeds, for the whole of that horse's life. The 2027 programme has already been fully scoped and funded by the Racing Foundation and the Horserace Betting Levy Board, with the 20 priorities to be turned into annual project plans with measurable targets.