The performance of local authority sports facilities in England during a period of recession and austerity

ABSTRACT

This paper examines how public sport facilities in England, which are dependent on subsidy from local authorities, have performed during a period of recession and austerity. Using data derived from Sport England’s National Benchmarking Service, we track the changes in a series of key operational performance measures to investigate how local authority sports centres have fared between 2005/6 and 2015/16. Four dimensions of performance are analysed: access, finance, utilisation, and customer satisfaction. The study includes 1116 sports centres. Our results show that the financial efficiency of English public sport facilities has improved significantly in the face of a reduction in local authority expenditure on sport and leisure services. There appears to be a business model in the sector that includes outsourcing management and raising activity charges, which has been accompanied by higher levels of customer satisfaction with price-related service attributes and with the overall experience of using a facility. A possible explanation for these findings might be an improved quality of provision and greater customer orientation. At the same time, there appears to be a diminished focus on social inclusion objectives. A key challenge is how to achieve market development whereby new and targeted customers are attracted.

KEYWORDS:

• Performance
• efficiency
• access
• customer satisfaction
• austerity
• sport centres

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. The Facilities Planning Model is a Sport England tool that models supply and demand at local level to enable evidence-based decision making concerning the provision, closure and upgrade of major sport facilities.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Girish Ramchandani

Girish Ramchandani is a Reader in Sport Management at Sheffield Hallam University’s Sport Industry Research Centre and specialises in performance measurement and analysis research.

Simon Shibli

Simon Shibli is a Chartered Institute of Management Accountants (CIMA) qualified management accountant whose specialist areas of interest are the finance and economics of the sport and leisure industries.

Shia Ping Kung

Shia Ping Kung is a senior research fellow at Sheffield Hallam University and principal analyst for Sport England’s National Benchmarking Service for sports centres.