These will be updated on a regular basis.
Current version June 2012, using facility costs for Q2 2012.
The Sports Facility Calculator (SFC) is a
planning tool which helps to estimate the amount of demand for key
community sports facilities that is created by a given
population.
The SFC can be downloaded from the link below. Please read the
contents of this page, in particular the File Extraction
Instructions. If you do not extract the Zip file correctly, the SFC
will not open.
Click on this link to the Sports Facility
Calculator Download page
Note: To run the calculator your Macro Security Level must be
set to 'Medium' or 'Low'. To check this open Excel and select
'Tools > Macro > Security'
What is the Sports Facility Calculator?
The SFC has been created by Sport England to
help local planning authorities quantify how much additional demand
for the key community sports facilities (swimming pools, sports
halls and artifical grass pitches), is generated by populations of
new growth, development and regeneration areas.
The SFC was first developed to help estimate
the facility needs of the new communities in the Eastern Quarry
Development, Dartford, and the Milton Keynes future growth areas.
It has been used to help local authorities in infrastructure
planning, s.106 and Supplementary Planning Documents.
What can it do?
The SFC helps with quantifying the demand side
of the facility provision equation. It helps to answer questions
such as, “How much additional demand for swimming will the
population of a new development area generate?”, and “What would
the cost be to meet this new demand at today’s values?”
The SFC is designed to estimate the needs of
discrete populations for sports facilities (such as sports halls
and swimming pools) created by a new community of a residential
development.
It’s important to remember that the SFC looks
only at demand for facilities and does not take into
account any existing supply of facilities.
Warning!
Whilst the SFC can be used to estimate the
demand for swimming pools,, sports halls and AGPs for the
population of any area, such as that of an entire local authority,
there are dangers in how such figures are subsequently used at this
level, e.g. in comparing them with the current supply of
facilities for strategic gap analysis.
The SFC should not be used for strategic gap
analysis; this approach is fundamentally flawed. The SFC has no
spatial dimension. The figures it produces represent total demand
for the chosen population. It is important to note that the SFC
does not take account of:
- Facility location compared to
demand
- Capacity and availability of
facilities - opening hours
- Cross boundary movement of
demand
- Travel networks and topography
- Attractiveness of facilities
For these reasons, the total demand figures
generated by the SFC should not simply be compared with facilities
provided within the same area.
What facilities does it cover?
The current community facilities that the SFC
can be used for are:
- Swimming pools
- Sports halls
- Artifical grass pitches
- Indoor bowls centres
However, this will be extended to others in
the future, such as indoor tennis centres.
Understanding what the figures mean
In calculating the increased demand for sports
facilities for a given population increase, the SFC uses parameters
developed for Sport England’s Facilities Planning Model. These are
used to estimate how many visits per week in the peak period the
population would generate for a hall, pool, artificial grass
pitch and indoor bowls centre. In order for these numbers to
be meaningful, they are converted into the equivalent size of
facilities needed to satisfy this demand.
It’s important to remember that although the
calculations are based on the peak period, the process also assumes
that the additional facilities are open for community use
throughout the whole week (over 80 hours per week), including both
peak and off peak periods.
Planning to meet the demands of the new
population using facilities which are not open for the
whole week will need to make allowance for the reduced hours. For
example, if a new development generated the need for a 4 court
sports hall, which it is planned to be met by a dual use facility
on a school site, community use may only be in after school hours,
say 30 hours per week. This would obviously be significantly short
of the 40 hours in the peak period, never mind the 80 hours of
total community access needed.
How does it work?
The SFC uses information that Sport England
has gathered on who uses facilities and applies this to the
population profile of the local area. This ensures that the
calculations are sensitive to the needs of the people who actually
live there.
The SFC then turns this estimation of demand
(visits per week) into the equivalent amount of facility which is
needed to meet these visits each week. For swimming pools it uses
square metres of water, lanes and 25m, four lanes pool units. For
halls, it uses the number of badminton courts and four court hall
units. For indoor bowls, it uses rinks and centres. For artificial
grass pitches it uses pitches.
Other features of the SFC include:
- It uses the population profiles of individual
local authorities
- It allows new population profiles to be
created to be used as the base population
- Changes in sports participation rates can be
incorporated
- The costs of facilities can be shown,
including regional variations in building rates.
It’s important to remember that the SFC looks
at demand for facilities and does not take into account any
existing supply of facilities.
The SFC will give a target total for the
number of facilities that are needed to meet a population's sports
facility needs. This is based on the local population, national
participation rates and the national average for facility
usage.
The SFC helps with the demand side of the
facility provision equation.
How does the SFC calculate the demand for facilities?
The SFC uses survey information for the
different facilities to estimate who uses what and how often. This
builds up a profile of usage, which can be then applied to estimate
how much demand any given population would generate.
This demand is then converted into the
quantity of facilities needed, and expressed as square metres of
water, badminton courts, artificial grass pitches or bowling rinks,
taking into account the national average usage rate of each
facility type.
The data on who uses facilities has come
from:
- National Halls and Pools Survey
- Benchmarking Service
- Indoor Bowls User Survey
- General Household Survey
- Synthetic Turf Pitch User Survey.
Building costs
The building costs of facilities used in the
SFC are for average facilities that are endorsed by Sport England
and exclude the following:
- Site abnormal costs, such as poor ground,
difficult access, long service connections and so on
- VAT
- Land costs
The SFC automatically applies the Building
Cost Information Service’s (RICS) Pricing Adjustment Factors to the
costs. These variations are on a County and London Borough
basis.