Where next for local delivery of the Olympic legacy and community sport?
12 August 2015
Chris Hayes, LGiU Associate
Summary
With the Government’s latest figures showing a decline in the number of people participating in sport and a new sports strategy on the horizon, local authorities are under pressure to find new ways of delivering community sport and keeping facilities open, as this briefing explores.
· Sport England’s latest Active People Survey reveals that while the number of people participating in sport as a whole reached a high of 15.9 million in the run up to the 2012 London Olympic Games, there is now a downward trend in participation with 220,000 fewer people playing sport over the last six months. The decline is most evident in sports that rely on local authority facilities with swimming and gym participation recording the biggest declines.
· A recent survey found that local authority expenditure on sport and leisure has been reduced by £42 million since 2010, alongside a number of closures to key facilities. As a consequence of budget pressures local authority funding is becoming more closely tied outcomes, with many councils integrating sport and leisure with health and social care.
· The new sports minister Tracey Crouch has pledged to overhaul the way in which funding is distributed to sports bodies and will launch a consultation on a new sports strategy to target funding at grassroots sport and join up sport and physical activity.
· A proposed amendment to the Charities Bill to require independent schools to open up their facilities and sports grounds to the community could lead to new opportunities for local authorities to deliver community sport in partnership with independent schools, and the voluntary sector.
· An analysis of innovation in the local government sector reveals four major trends in the way in which local authorities are responding to the challenge of keeping sports facilities open and increasing participation: commissioning and integration with health and social care; ‘spinning out’ services and transferring assets to community sports trusts; exploiting planning and development opportunities to build new facilities; and forging strategic relationships with schools and the voluntary sector.
Briefing in full
Introduction
Against the backdrop of a summer of high profile sport events – including the recent success of the women’s football team in Canada – the 10th anniversary of the announcement of the London 2012 Olympic Games has been marked by heavy scrutiny in the press and in parliament as the latest Active People Survey reveals a decline in the number of people participating in sport.
The new sports minister Tracey Crouch has promised a review of sport policy and a new strategy, to be outlined in a forthcoming green paper, as the latest participation figures show a downward trend in participation with 220,000 fewer people playing sport at least once a week, over the last six months. The decline is most evident in sports that rely on local authority facilities with swimming and gym/keep fit recording the biggest declines. Further spending reductions outlined in the summer budget and spending review will continue to put pressure on local authorities to find new ways of managing local facilities and boosting participation. There are examples of innovation in the sector which this briefing explores below.
In the House of Lords, a proposed amendment to the Charities Bill to require independent schools to open up their facilities and sports grounds to the community has, despite its defeat, attracted attention and further work in this area could lead to new opportunities for local authorities to deliver community sport in partnership with independent schools, and the voluntary sector.
The UK’s physical inactivity endemic meanwhile has been highlighted from a different angle this summer as a poll conducted by school services provider Fit for Sport found that nearly three quarters of primary school teachers expect their pupils to spend the summer in front of televisions and tablets rather than being outdoors.
At the same time, senior leaders in the sports sector are urging the government to overhaul sports funding and calling for a ten year cross-party strategy on sport.
This policy briefing:
· summarises the headline findings from the latest Active People Survey;
· explores the implications of the summer budget and spending review on the olympic legacy and community sport;
· highlights the Government’s emerging priorities and policies for community sport in anticipation of a new green paper and strategy for sport; and
· reviews how local authorities are responding to the challenge of keeping facilities open and increasing participation in the context of austerity.
Active People Survey findings
Analysis of the latest Active People Survey dataset reveals that the number of people participating in sport reached a high of 15.9 million in October 2012 in the run up to the London Games (14.6 million in 2006), but there are indications that that figure is now in a downwards trend, which has attracted scrutiny in the press, and in parliament.
The latest dataset covering the period October 2014 to March 2015 reveals that:
· Approximately 15.5 million people take part in sport once a week, with running, tennis and basketball attracting more participants, but 220,000 have given up sport since October.
· Since 2005 and winning the Olympic Games, the sports that have witnessed the biggest increase in weekly participation are athletics (873,700), cycling (374,100) and table tennis (31,600).
· The number of people playing no sport at all had increased by 1.2 million on last year. Almost six in 10 adults still do not play sport regularly; nearly 400,000 people have given up sport since the Olympic Games three years ago
· The decline is more evident among those sports that are connected to local authority facilities, with swimming recording the biggest decline. Gym and keep fit also recorded its first decline since the Active People Survey began, falling by 153,000.
· The downward trend in swimming is not new. The number of people swimming has been dropping since October 2009.
· Benchmarking against 2005 levels, swimming (-728,800), football (-140,100) and badminton (-66,800) are the Olympic sports which have seen the biggest decreases.
· Despite its decline, swimming remains Britain’s biggest participation sport, with 2.5 million people regularly taking part. It is followed by running, cycling, football and golf.
· Other sports which have seen their popularity drop are badminton, table tennis and Equestrianism.
· Cycling is witnessing a surge in participation after the success of Team GB’s cycling team at London in 2012, extra investment in cycling infrastructure from the government, and the effect of the Tour de Yorkshire.
· Tennis is up from 38,200 to 422,400 people participation a week. This follows a successful strategy by the Lawn Tennis Association to make tennis available when and where people want.
· Basketball is also up from 21,800 to 152,900 people playing a week, especially among young people in school and further education.
Analysis by Sport England into the decline in gym participation reveals changing tastes in this sector with the number of people doing aerobics style classes declining, while high-intensity pilates and yoga are on the rise. There is also popular trend towards informal running with community/volunteer led projects such as Parkrun and Color Run witnessing increasing participation.
With regards to specific demographic groups:
· The number of 16-25 year olds playing sport has remained stable at 3.8 million once a week, and encouragingly the number of people from black and ethnic minority backgrounds playing sport has increased by 37,600 in the last six months, to 2.9 million. There has been strong growth in this group in tennis, football and basketball.
· The number of disabled people who play sport has reduced to 37,300 overall, due to the decline in swimming and gym, while football, tennis and running are seeing positive increases from this group.
· The gender gap in sport has reduced slightly in the last six months, with 6.86 million women playing sport once a week compared to 8.63 million men (a gap of 1.78 million).
· There has been a small drop (0.5 per cent) in the proportion of people from lower socio economic groups playing sport each week (now 25.7 per cent). Again this is connected to the decline in swimming.
Local authorities are encouraged to visit Sport England’s Active People Dataset Profiling Tool to understand how these participation figures translate to their local area.
What does the Budget 2015 mean for community sport?
The overall narrative of the Chancellor of the Exchequer’s first Conservative-only budget since 1996 was one of continued fiscal discipline and deficit reduction. The budgetwas followed by a Treasury paper launching the Autumn spending review in which the Chancellor has confirmed the £20bn cuts to Whitehall budgets. The Government will ring-fence the NHS, international development, defence and (parts of) education, meaning departments such as communities and local government are expected to face further significant cuts. Each unprotected department has been asked to come up with savings plans of 25% and 40% of their budget. See LGiU’s briefing on the budget implications for local authoritiesHERE. The Department for Culture, Media and Sport's (DCMS) annual budget of £1.2bn will be cut by £30m.
Around £325 million in public funding is invested in community sport through Sport England each year, of which around 75 per cent (£243m) is from the National Lottery, with £83 million coming from the Exchequer through the DCMS. National funding for sport has actually faired reasonably well over the last few years with the DCMS contribution to grass-roots sport largely insulated in the Spending Review 2013 with just a 5% budget reduction and funding for elite sport protected altogether. At the same time, the share of the National Lottery revenues allocated to sport have risen consistently since 2010-11 which has balanced out the reductions in DCMS funding and resulted in Sport England’s budget increasing from just over £250 million in 2010-11 to £325 million in 2014-15.
It has been at the local level where funding for sport and leisure has been hit hardest. On the back of consistent spending reductions to local authorities since 2010, councils now have 25% less spending power overall. A recent BBC survey found that local authority expenditure on sport and leisure has been reduced by £42 million since 2010, alongside a number of closures to key facilities. The table below shows how this varies at a regional level.
North East / - £ 7,147,94 8North West / -£12,372,959
Yorkshire / -£3,209,581
East Midlands / -£5,038,980
West Midlands / -£9,638,972
East / -£5,114,871
London / -£8,891,367
South West / -£3,347,463
South East / +£12,340,287
Total / -£42,421,854
The LGA meanwhile has calculated that the overall budget being spent by local authorities on sport and leisure has been reduced from £1.4bn in 2009-10 to £1bn, so the forthcoming spending reductions will be on top of a cut of around £400m nationally per year. And the Chartered Institute of Public Finance and Accountancy has analysed the sport and leisure budgets without libraries and other cultural services and calculates the budget purely for sport has fallen £215m a year, from £832m in 2009-10 to £617m nationally this year, a cut of around 25%. In terms of staffing, a survey by the Chief Cultural & Leisure Officers Association has estimated that 6,000 sport and leisure staff have gone since 2010.
As local authorities mirror central government’s commitments to protect spending for essential public services and meet the needs of an ageing population and rising care costs, local authorities can expect to face continued pressure to reduce sport and leisure budgets. There is also a risk that local authorities will reduce the amount of discretionary rate relief provided to grassroots sport clubs.
As a consequence of these budget pressures, we are already seeing local authority funding for sport become more closely tied to social outcomes. Indeed, the Government has already indicated that it is keen to move away from spending being focused on driving participation towards delivering better value for money and achieving wider social goals. Sports bodies meanwhile are beginning to shift away from being providers of sports for sport’s sake to becoming providers of sport for social good. In its report Fit for the Future, the Sport and Recreation Alliance has identified a number of challenges and opportunities that the sports sector must respond to, and these apply equally to local authority sports commissioners:
· Identifying ways to deliver the same outputs for less, for example through shared services and more streamlined organisational/delivery models etc.
· Improving the evidence base around the impact of sport and recreation to demonstrate its wider social and economic benefits
· Exploiting sport’s commercial appeal to generate more income from private sources such as sponsorship, broadcasting and commercial partnerships
· Exploiting technology more effectively to deliver efficiencies and improve the customer experience
· Ensuring that sport understands its customers better and is able to compete with alternative forms of entertainment and new market entrants
· Leveraging expertise from the private and third sectors to deliver shared objectives at lower cost.
Other potential knock-on effects of the budget for community sport include potentially fewer families participating in sport as a result of reductions in benefits and caps on public sector pay. And with many people participating in sport and recreation at weekends, the Government’s plan to extend retail opening hours could create a more challenging and competitive environment for sport and recreation providers. Proposals to devolve powers to city regions could have a significant impact on sport and recreation if, for example, they including devolving powers over planning, transport and infrastructure.
A new strategy for sport
In response to the recent downward trend in the number of people playing sport, the new sports minister Tracey Crouch has pledged to overhaul the way in which funding is distributed to sports bodies and will launch a consultation on a new sports strategy to target funding at grassroots sport and join up sport and physical activity. She said: “The recent downward trend in participation has demonstrated the current approach has had its day. It’s not the return we expect for a large investment of public money.