Following last week’s blog looking at how the London Borough of Havering have made their leisure facilities more sustainable; this blog explores the various strategies and funding options to help London’s leisure facilities achieve the same.
Current updates and growing resources
Nationally, several bodies have set the wheels in motion in gathering intelligence and developing strategies to bolster the future of leisure centres and swimming pools.
As a follow up to the launch of the Department for Culture, Media and Sport’s new Get Active strategy, Sport England has recently launched a new sustainability strategy called ‘Every Move’ to help bring together the wider sports sector and work towards the same goals; to become more climate ready and resilient.
In their ‘Every Move’ strategy, Sport England highlight that they will be investing £45 million in the sport sector and will co-develop, with the sector, a new climate adaptation and resilience strategy by 2027.
ukactive conducted an energy risk survey to better understand the challenges that leisure centres in the UK face in relation to energy use. Survey results are currently being used to influence policy makers and energy companies to identify solutions to help sustain the running of leisure centres for community use. ukactive has also successfully worked with Ofgem, the energy regulator, to develop policies that protect the interest of all consumers, including private and public leisure centres.
The Mayor of London underwent a public review in September 2023 and developed the ‘London Climate Resilience Review’ to better understand the wider adaptations required to make London ready for future climate change. A total of fifty recommendations were provided, ranging from making London climate resilient to engaging Londoners to make climate-ready choices.
In the report, London Sport and its sport partners have been recommended by the Mayor’s Office to establish a Climate Working Party for Sport in London.
Although the London Climate Resilience Review outlined what London’s authorities and the Government need to consider, the report did not cover in detail the challenges the sport sector in London currently faces. There is, therefore, an opportunity for London’s sport sector to push for a London-wide leisure policy to address current and future sustainability challenges to futureproof Londoner’s access to exercise.
Available investments to support leisure centre sustainability
In addition to Sport England’s Swimming Pool Support Fund and ‘Every Move’ Fund, plus future plans to create ‘Community Hubs’ that also incorporate the NHS ‘Integrated Care Systems’ model, there are other funding sources available for leisure centres and their local authorities to tap into, to sustain facility use. The Local Government Association brought together various funding arrangements for consideration to support the futureproofing of leisure facilities:
– Social Impact Bonds
– Public Works Loan Bond
– Developer Contributions
– Community Infrastructure Levy
– Social Investment
There are also other funding sources that leisure facilities can use, such as the Public Sector Decarbonisation Scheme and the Cities for Climate Investment.
The above financial solutions are not innovative, but they demonstrate how leisure facilities can use various funding models to sustain their services.
Embracing the sustainability-related aspects of our leisure centres also means taking advantage of their unique capacity for modelling sustainable behaviours. Where better to show that electric heat pumps are up to the job of vast heating requirements than swimming pools? And where better outside the home to have people understand the effectiveness of low-flow shower heads?
To help futureproof facilities, we need to shift our perspectives of money as the only solution to resolving issues to one that focuses on working together more collaboratively, using local resources and creative solutions to address bespoke needs. Money on its own can be misleading and insufficient to address varying challenges leisure centres face.
In our final blog next week, we will focus on local authorities’ and London Sport’s thoughts on how we as a sector can move forward to future proof leisure facilities for London’s youth.
