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Policy Context
Developing Policy for Sport
Assessing Local Needs
Active Places
Planning for Sport and Active Recreation: Objectives and Opportunities
Protecting Playing Fields
Planning Obligations Kitbag
Planning Bulletins
PPG17 Companion Guide
Sport England has developed a suite of tools to assist local authorities in making the most of opportunities presented in planning for sport and active recreation. These focus on the assessment of local needs, objectives to guide how planners and others might best deliver these needs and aspirations, and a series of practical tools to assist with securing the best deal for sport in new development.
A useful starting point is Sport England’s statement of planning objectives. Planning for Sport and Recreation: Objectives and Opportunities sets out Sport England’s aspirations for sport and recreation in respect of the provision and protection of facilities, opportunities for sport and recreation in the urban fringe and the wider countryside and planning issues associated with specific facilities. The following pages provide detailed guidance for planners on:
1. Assessing Need and Demand
Local authorities need to carry out assessments of need and demand based on the typology and method outlined in the Companion Guide to PPG17. A number of strategic planning tools which have been developed by Sport England which could be used to help assess demand and provision, these being:
| Facilities Planning Model | A strategic modelling tool used to estimate the level of demand for sports facilities within the local population, comparing this with the supply of facilities within a given local area. Taking account of the size and location of the facilities, the model highlights any inadequacies in facility provision. The technique can also be used to model ‘what if’ scenarios, for instance, the impact of increases in population, the closure of individual facilities, and the opening of new facilities. |
| Sports Facility Calculator | An interactive tool which estimates the demand for major community sports facilities. The population profiles can be chosen from an existing local authority population or built from scratch to allow the impact of major new residential developments to be assessed. The estimator uses the demand parameters established through the Facilities Planning Model. Assumptions on community participation of sports facilities are derived from data from the Benchmarking service, the National Halls and Pools Survey and General Household Survey. The estimator also allows the user to introduce percentage changes in demand to represent the effects of sports development initiatives. The facilities covered by the Estimator include:·
(Indoor Tennis Centres & Synthetic Turf Pitches – to be added) |
| Active Places Power | An online database of sports facilities available to local authorities, Central Government Departments, NGDB and Regional Bodies, allowing the user to plan more strategically for sport by using a number of tools. www.activeplacespower.com The following core facility types are covered by the initiative:
Active Places allows local authorities to “benchmark” the sports provision in their areas against other local authorities within the same ONS “family cluster”. Through Active Places it will also be possible to use thematic maps to examine provision against a wide variety of Census variables, and carry out simple supply and demand analysis e.g. population within catchments. |
| Playing Pitch Strategy | The Playing Pitch Model (PPM) and is an Excel spreadsheet containing six tabulated sheets. Basic information is entered into the spreadsheet, from which team generation rates and number of teams (now and in the future) can be automatically provided. Guidance on how to use the calculator is provided on the Sport England website, as is the calculator itself.Local authorities are urged to adopt the revised methodology, to enable cross-border comparisons to be undertaken, to assist with benchmarking (see below) and to provide an easily understood approach which can be adopted in the planning system. This last aspect can be particularly important when dealing with planning appeals involving the potential loss of playing pitches. |
| National Benchmarking Service | An essential part of the strategic planning process is the measurement of performance, in order to determine how well a strategy has achieved its intended goals. The aim of the National Benchmarking Service for sports halls and pools is to provide local authorities with rigorous and robust information on the performance of their sports halls and swimming pools, compared with that of equivalent ‘family’ facilities in similar locations elsewhere in the country. Users of the service receive a performance report for each relevant facility, based upon specific information, including user surveys, details of facility programming, and financial returns. Reports on each facility comprise:·a contextual introduction;·the centre’s scores for all the performance indicators compared with 25%, 50% and 75% benchmark scores for centres nationally. These benchmarks are selected to represent similar type and size of facility and a similar socio-economic profile of facility catchment area;·a 15 minute drive-time catchment area map for the centre; and·frequency distributions for all the questions in the user survey. |
2.The Place of Sport and Active Recreation in New Development
The process for local authorities to secure sport and recreation facilities through new housing development is set out in the Planning Kitbag.. This includes a range of tools, techniques and examples which help to guide the practicalities of day-to-day implementation. It also includes examples of supplementary planning guidance, section 106 templates and examples of community use agreements. Policy objectives to help guide decision making for planning applications are set out in Planning for Sport and Recreation: Objectives and Opportunities.
Urban design plays an important role in creating opportunities for sport and active recreation in new developments. Active Design outlines three defining principles to help ensure that new residents are healthy and active.
3. Preparing supplementary planning documents
Specific guidance on the preparation of SPDs has been developed to assist with the development of consistent approaches to sport and active recreation. Sport England has been compiling a detailed analysis of recently prepared SPDs, along with a listing of other recent SPDs.
4.Guidance to help determine planning applications
Sport England’s planning policy and implementation objectives are set out in Planning for Sport and Active Recreation: Objectives and Opportunities. This interim statement replaces the old Part B section of the Land Use Planning Policy Statement (LUPPS), published in 1999 (Part A is replaced by Spatial Planning for Sport and Recreation) and forms a reference point for the consideration of how sport and active recreation issues should be treated in the determination of planning applications. Issues considered include:
Planning, Provision and Protection
Planning for Sport in the Urban Fringe, Countryside and Designated Areas
Facility Issues
5.Facility design and other technical bulletins
Sport England has produced a range of guidance notes which cover a variety of both general and more specific sport-related issues. These technical bulletins contain a range of information which will be of interest to those dealing with proposals for new development along with inquiries into facility-related issues. These are;
View a full list of Sport England's Design Guidance Notes
6.Protecting playing pitches.
Sport England has a specific remit from Government to be consulted on any proposals for development which affect playing pitches.
A sporting future for the playing fields of England - planning policy statement(198Kb)
Towards a level playing field - updated July 2005 (383 Kb)
Towards a level playing field electronic toolkit
Team Generation Rate calculator
Team Generation Rate database
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