Means as well as ends: some critical insights for UK sport policy on the impact of facility ownership and configuration on sports participation

ABSTRACT

The effectiveness of sports facility provision in increasing participation is debated internationally. The impact will be mediated by the sport delivery system, the welfare system within which sports policy might operate and the culture of sport. Change in the political persuasion of recent UK governments has followed a broadly consistent neoliberal policy direction of moving from big government and public ownership, to outsourcing and governance through networks. The intended aim: to more effectively achieve policy objectives, such as subjective well-being (SWB), health and social capital. A case study of participation in sport and fitness activities in a County Sports Partnership (CSP) in England is presented to examine if different ownership types and configuration of facilities that have emerged as a result of the policy direction, has influenced participation and policy targets. Regression results reveal that the ownership and configuration of facilities have no effect on the duration of activity and consequently no impact on policy outcomes. The largest influence on participation occurs in using facilities with others that were previously met there. The results also suggest that participation in facilities combined with other sport and physical activity can have an impact on health and social capital, and indirectly SWB. These insights are strongly indicative of the co-creation and interconnectedness of participation and suggest that policy should focus on network development more than specific forms of ownership and provision in seeking to achieve policy objectives. The research casts new critical light on the role of neoliberalism in sports policy.

KEYWORDS:

• Sport participation
• fitness
• facilities
• health
• well-being
• social capital

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. The list of facilities that were chosen were cross-checked against expectations of their representativeness by senior staff of the CSP.

2. 358 observations were available to analyse participation.

3. The average number of children is, however, higher, which is consistent with the higher average age in the range of 53 years old.

4. Although not removing bias an instrumental variable estimator yields consistent estimates with some loss of efficiency relative to OLS. If there is no endogeneity present OLS provides unbiased and efficient estimates and should be preferred. This is particularly important in the current context as there is a (relatively) small sample.

5. The focus is upon the relationship between participation at the facility being influenced by the policy outcomes. The relationship between forms of sports participation are explored further below.

6. The instrumental variables were collected as part of the questionnaire and included the height of the participant and whether or not they were happy, anxious and could trust neighbours when growing up.

7. As well as the instrumental variables noted above the distance to the facility used as added to help to identify the model as this s more likely to be related to participation than the outcomes.

8. Considering the outcome variables and also Gym minutes OrgPAtotmins InfPAtotmins wlkcyc, the Durbin test is: χ2(6) = 18.5904 (p = 0.0049) and the Wu-Hausman test is: F(6,334) = 3.02231 (p = 0.0069). With just the outcomes the resulting tests are: χ2(2) = 7.00171 (p = 0.0302) and F(2,338) = 3.34264 (p = 0.0365), respectively.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the British Academy [SG151782];

Notes on contributors

Harish Kumar

Harish Kumar is a PhD student at the School of Sport, Exercise and Health Sciences at Loughborough University.

Paul Downward

Paul Downward is Professor of Economics in the School of Sport, Exercise and Health Sciences at Loughborough University.

Ian Hodgkinson

Ian Hodgkinson is Professor of Strategy in the School of Business and Economics at Loughborough University.

Argyro Elisavet Manoli

Elisavet Manoli is Lecturer in Sports Marketing and Communications in the School of Sport, Exercise and Health Sciences at Loughborough University.