Sports Facility Calculator

The Sports Facilities 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.

View the sports facilities calculator.

View the sports facilities calculator instructions.

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 Facilities 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 synthetic turf 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 be used to estimate the facility needs of discrete populations, such as sports hall and swimming pool created by a new community of a residential development.

It’s important to remember that the SFC looks 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 swimming and sports hall needs for whole area populations, such as for a whole local authorities, there are dangers in how these figures are subsequently used at this level in matching it with current supply 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 figure that is produced is a total demand figure 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 total demand figure generated by the SFC should not simply be compared with facilities 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
• Synthetic turf pitches 
• Indoor bowls centres

However, this will be extended to others in the future, such as indoor tennis centres.

Understanding what the figures mean

It’s important to understand what the SFC figures mean. In coming to the amount of sports facilities a given population would generate, the SFC uses parameters developed for the Facility Planning Model to calculate how many visits in a week in the peak period the population would generate for a hall, pool and indoor bowls centre. In order for this number to be meaningful, it then converts these number of visits into the equivalent size of facilities to meet 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 hrs 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 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 hrs per week, which 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?

It uses information Sport England has gathered on who uses facilities and applies this to the actual population profile of the local area. This ensures that the calculation is 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.

Other features of the SFC include:

• It uses actual 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 can be made
• 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 utilises user survey information for the different facilities to estimate who uses these facilities and how often. This builds up a profile of usage, which can be then applied to estimate how much demand any population would generate.

This demand is then converted into actual facilities, and expressed as square metres of water, badminton courts, 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.