Time to get rid of the planner.
This week we have had two separate announcements regarding changes to race conditions. Surely it is now time to get rid of the planner which costs a ridiculous amount of money for a paper back book that will be put in the bin 2nd week in June.
We want to encourage more owners/ trainers/ horses and yet even after paying £350 per horse to be eligible, the details of what races you can enter are kept secret unless a further £55 is handed over. I suspect that most of that money is gobbled up in printing costs for what must be a fairly small print run?
For goodness sake... why not just put the pages up on the web site ( as is done with early season fixtures ) in a downloadable and printable format. I am never going to run a horse in Scotland or Cornwall so I don't need to know what the penalties are in the level 3 at Wadebridge. Any losses could be offset by sticking a few extra quid on the hunter certificate.
The sport says it wants to encourage more syndicates but do the PPA expect every syndicate member to fork out £55 each?
The biggest pool of possible point to point horses are those currently in National Hunt yards. If planner information was made available in the public domain and promoted, then isn't there a remote possibility that owners and trainers might have a look at what opportunities exist for their over handicapped horses?
There is absolutely no reasonable justification ( in my head anyway) for keeping the planner in its current form, when everything else including registration and entries is now online. And perhaps most importantly it would encourage flexibility and commonsense in reassessing race conditions to reflect what horses are actually around as the season progresses. Ie "What's the point in sticking with an intermediate on the card when there are only half a dozen intermediate horses within a 100 mile radius and it is blindingly obvious that a novice riders race would pull in 3 X as many entries "
Seems totally logical to me or am I missing something?
I seem to remember when I had a licence that you could input your horse's details and you could work out a programme under rules from maiden onwards for your horse? I have no idea if this still happens and it may have been short-lived? But certainly under Rules you could search for a particular race and then work out with the projected timescale where you could run your horse.
I did float something like this at a PPSA meeting a while back and asked if it would be possible to do when they were considering changing the website. The Weatherbys guy said they could do most things but it just had to be written into the software.