Sport England is the public body under the Department for Culture, Media and Sport responsible for the foundations of community sport.
It replaced the old Sports Council and alongside it operate two more publicly funded bodies; UK Sport (focusing on the elite) and the Youth Sport Trust (focusing on young people).
Sport England works with national governing bodies (NGBs) of various sports, such as the Football Association and the English Cricket Board, ostensibly to grow participation levels in sport.
Funding comes from both the Treasury and the National Lottery and has amounted to several billions since 1994 with NGBs making their individual cases for funding every four years. To claim a slice of the pie, participation levels are paramount.
In the last round – 2013-17 – £493m was allocated across 46 sports.
Key beneficiaries were the clearly cash-strapped game of football (£30m), cricket (£27.5m), cycling (£32m) and netball (£25m).
Followers of the various initiatives produced at regular intervals by this monolith will have witnessed many strategies over the last two decades. So it is no surprise we now have yet another which, once again, seems to represent a change of focus.
Those with time on their hands may wish to download the full version here. Perhaps one of the more telling paragraphs in this chunky document comes at the very start from Tracey Crouch, MP, Sports Minister.
“The sporting landscape has changed enormously in the last decade with shifting social patterns giving rise to new activities while others decline in popularity due, in part, to unprecedented pressure on leisure time and competing demands for people’s attention. Any new strategy has to tackle these changes head on.”
The document suggests that, whilst the NGBs of core mass participation sports continue to be recognised as important, they will attract proportionately less funding going forward as society makes different choices.
Additionally, some £250m over the next four years will focus on the currently inactive although this may well be money down a big fat drain.
Somewhat more encouraging is a refocusing away from a previous target group of 14-19 year-olds to children as young as five which clearly makes sense.
“We welcome our new remit to work with children and young people from the age of five and recognise that our responsibility lies outside the school curriculum. We will focus on pre and post-school activities that increase children’s capability and enjoyment.”
It still begs the question what is happening within curriculum time. However, this has to be a welcome change of direction albeit the sums are small beer at 17% of a £1bn budget spread over four years.
Put in context, current estimates suggest the NHS is currently spending between £6-8bn a year combating obesity.
As ever with any Quango, getting under the numbers is not easy. They present two pie-charts; one for the previous four-year period to 2016 and the next one to 2021 detailing where the money goes. Unfortunately, each has entirely different headings.
The figures do suggest that NGBs will have a smaller slice of the pie – 29% against 38% – so the pressure to prove worth for every pound of investment will be ever greater.
“Large amounts of public funding have traditionally supported people who already have an established habit…As a result, some organisations have become progressively more reliant on public money to support this market.”
Clearly, funding in our traditional sports will come under increased scrutiny and not before time.
For example, the ECB – Extremely Clueless Bunch – recently announced a grant for new nets for a local cricket club making the case that the old nets had fallen into disrepair and claiming the new facilities would miraculously produce a girls team.
Had they any notion of grassroots cricket they might have asked where the money had gone that could have funded this project without the need for public money. Surely not into players’ back pockets?
There is more chance of one of their Saturday hired guns buying a raffle ticket than this club producing a girls cricket team.
And across town they plough on with the politically driven box-ticking Bradford Park Avenue project.
As ever, the clueless remain clueless.
People of my generation were extremely lucky to grow up in an age devoid of centrally located and publicly funded beasts like Sport England. Who needed flashing multi-coloured stumps when a stolen milk crate would do?
Strangely, sport thrived in schools and local clubs, not that I am suggesting Sport England is to blame for our current woes, merely that they are an expensive sticking plaster for a gaping wound.
The activities that have shown real growth over the last decade have not been driven by organisations like Sport England.
There are more people playing five-a-side football now than the full game with the growth here driven by commercial enterprises. The phenomenal success of park runs has grown arguably through social media.
What both these examples demonstrate is a change in demand for the type of sport on offer. The traditional longer format sports are being replaced by bite-sized offerings reflecting society’s desire for flexibility and choice.
NGBs and local administrators simply struggle to understand this, many having grown up in a different era. Society is changing and if you have a mass market product that struggles for mass market appeal then sticking your head in the sand will serve no purpose.
A tree may look outwardly healthy for many years as it’s roots rot away.
Clearly, a billion quid is a lot of money but spread over four years it will not go far to even begin to tackle entrenched problems of inactivity and poor diets.
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