What do chief executives and top council politicians want from sport and leisure?
There are a number of emerging themes we’ve encountered on our travels as strategic advisers. These themes should provide leaders of sport and leisure and their operating partners with a challenge and I hope, a degree of optimism looking ahead.
Targeted, cost-effective interventions that deliver outcomes will continue to be positively encouraged. “Give us bang for our buck,” is the chief’s battle cry with a challenge to redirect funding to high-value, high-impact activities. You’ll be expected to dump the high cost, low impact services if you’ve not done so already.
Innovation gets you to the top table and keeps you there. Using examples like Birmingham City Council’s Be Active programme, you can “lead the cross-cutting revolution,” where sport and leisure has the potential to act as a pathfinder for other larger directorates in achieving outcomes through integrated services.
A big headache for chiefs is the rising cost of social care and health. For many “public health and well-being is the greatest opportunity” for the sector – our role in acting as a catalyst for enabling behaviour change is key to unlocking longer-term savings in spiralling costs of an ageing and unhealthy nation.
The chiefs also want partners who can deliver outside their facilities as well as operate them. “Don’t just run our leisure centres” is a key challenge I’m hearing. To create an active borough you’ll be expected to animate parks and open spaces, make mass participation events happen, enable schools to open up to the community, engage with citizens in care homes and vulnerable young people, support sports clubs and inspire major stakeholders to play their part in an holistic approach to sport and physical activity. This is likely to be linked to your wider cultural portfolio of children’s play, libraries, parks, museums, tourism and heritage. I’m predicting that those operators that step up to this challenge and innovate, will secure the high value contracts of the future.
Summing up, there will be differences in style and politics, but the savvy service heads and operators are taking a steer from the chief – those that do will be seen as part of the future solution, rather than becoming a sitting duck for further ‘efficiency savings’. Quackers.
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