Report critical of lack of long-term legacy in grassroots sports
A new report is calling on the Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport (DCMS) to “urgently” review the condition of leisure facilities.
As well as updating the report’s authors, the House of Commons’ Committee of Public Accounts, by this June, DCMS is asked to work with other government departments to ensure the financial sustainability of leisure facilities.
Published on 8 January, the 28-page report ‘Grassroots participation in sport and physical activity’ criticises DCMS for lacking “a compelling vision for integrating physical activity into everyday life”, and “we are not convinced that its approach to working with wider government and industry is effective”.
The report acknowledges “success in many ways” of the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games. “But 10 years on, [DCMS] has fallen short of the increase in grassroots sports and physical activity participation promised” as part of the Games’ long-term legacy. “Despite Sport England spending an average of £323m of taxpayers’ money since 2015 to increase participation… the percentage of active adults increased by only 1.2 percentage points between November 2016 and November 2019.” Nearly two in five adults in England still do not meet the chief medical officer’s guidelines for recommended activity.
It goes on to allege that DCMS and Sport England have made “little progress in tackling inequalities and barriers to people participating… and Sport England’s spending data is not sufficiently granular to assess how well it targets spending at the least active”.
Further, the report says: “For example, it distributed £1.5bn in grants in the five years starting 2016-17, but only knows which local authorities this funding went to for £450m of this spending.”
Sport England has countered the latter suggestion as “inaccurate”.
The Committee report outlines seven conclusions and recommendations, many calling for descriptions of performance metrics that will be used to measure success with tackling persistent inactivity levels, participation outcomes from hosting future events and other requirements.
Responding to an enquiry from S&PA Professional, a Sport England spokesperson said: “Supporting people to be active throughout their lives is essential, and our strategy ‘Uniting the Movement’ is dedicated to investing effectively in partnerships and programmes to reduce inactivity and tackle stubborn inequalities.
"Sport England invests public money responsibly and transparently, recording and publishing data on all grant recipients – including location data right down to postcode level. This is all clearly available online, with information on where every pound that we spend goes.
- For more on the report, visit here.
