Sport England is waste of money - claim
Posted: Tue Feb 27, 2018 9:48 pm
In the Times today, sports journalist and author, Matthew Seyd launches a blistering, evidence-based assault on the credibility of Sport England. Doubtless in his thoughts are the £££ millions spent on winter 'athletes' skidding about on their ar$es to minimal public benefit with minimal prospects for participation by the vast majority. Yet, where £££ millions are spent on participation - basketball, for instance - participation falls. Overall, Sport England has had a deplorably bad impact on sports take-up. It's become a racket by which funds are transferred from those who don't participate to the (mainly privately-educated) elite who do - with a sizeable admin rake-off.
It's the kind of thing that might be an ECF Board agenda item - where Board members review and absorb the points made in the piece, and ask themselves whether anything sounds familiar. I don't suppose this will happen. But who knows. Anyway, read on. See if you find anything to reflect upon >>>> [full text from the Times (£) ]
______________________________________________________
I hesitate to say this; it won’t go down well with friends. Sport, after all, represents a close-knit family and many are on the payroll. The truth, however, is indisputable: government largesse towards sport has proved to be nothing more than an expensive displacement exercise, a distraction, a sustained exercise in political virtue signalling.
A bit of background. Sport was one of the designated good causes of the National Lottery in 1994. Sport England, a vast quango, was given the brief to increase participation. The idea was that a group of officials operating out of an office near Whitehall could somehow alter the behaviour of people in Brixton and Brighton. For most of the first decade, more than 34 per cent of their budget was spent on officials, offices and reports; so-called “administrative overhead”.
Expensive facilities were created, but underutilised. Local authority funding was squeezed. Sports activists were forced to learn a new vocabulary of “whole sports plans” and “community assets funding”. But it was difficult to tell whether any of this was having an impact. Coaches and other activists seemed more focused on accessing public subsidy than inspiring people to play and compete. I heard of organisations offering bribes to participants to artificially boost their numbers.
In 2005, Sport England took a belated decision to measure outcomes. A polling company was commissioned to assess the number of adults participating in three sessions of sport per week by making tens of thousands of phone calls. It was called the Active People survey, which cost around £5 million annually to collate, but the results were entirely predictable. The numbers participating in sport plateaued despite all the grandiose rhetoric.
Sport England responded by changing the goalposts. Instead of targeting the number of people playing at least three times a week, it moved to a target of at least once a week. Despite the expensive boost of a home Olympics, an event that was supposed to turbocharge participation, activity declined according to this criterion, too. By 2016, the last year of the Active People survey, 15.8 million people played sport at least once week, a fall of 0.4 per cent since 2012.
Not all sports funding is directed at participation, of course. UK Sport is the body that focuses on elite athletes. It has proved highly successful when it comes to Olympic triumphs, although there is a healthy debate about whether this is a legitimate area of public spending. Critics point out that elite success does little to inspire people to take up sport. “It is like supposing you can inspire a new generation of guitar players by getting them to watch Jimi Hendrix,” Barrie Houlihan, professor of sport at Loughborough University, has said. This is particularly true of the Winter Olympics, where precious few could pop out to try bobsleigh, even if they wanted to.
Defenders of UK Sport respond that even if elite success does not drive participation, it generates national pride. They point to the joy that surrounded the London 2012 and Rio 2016 Olympics. They say that this is a sensible area of spending. As I said, a healthy debate.
But that is the devastating point about Sport England: there can be no legitimate debate. Whatever the health and social benefits of sport, these cannot accrue if public spending does not move the needle of participation in the first place. Over the past 25 years, billions have been spent without any impact. Indeed, the spending probably undermined participation by forcing coaches, who could have been doing creative work, to navigate the complex funding landscape devised by a central bureaucracy utterly detached from the real world.
You can glimpse these ironies by looking at basketball, a recent cause célèbre. Politicians and pundits have called for more money to be given to a sport that has many participants from poorer and ethnic backgrounds. On its own terms, this argument is not without merit, but it utterly misses the deeper point. The only way that public spending on basketball can impact participation, ethnic or otherwise, is if such spending works, which it hasn’t.
Despite millions of pounds funnelled to Basketball England, participation has plummeted. The number of adults playing each month dropped by almost 100,000 between 2008 and 2016. This should come as no surprise. Basketball England is another dysfunctional body addicted to subsidy. Why should we expect the sport to thrive if its officials are incompetent and there is no mechanism to drive competition and innovation?
The social benefits of sport are, by the way, less clearcut than often claimed. If you are taught by coaches who are undermotivated, or who embody poor values, you are not going to reap a social dividend. Evidence suggests that sport only has positive consequences if the coaches are outstanding mentors and leaders. This was another problem with the crude targeting of participation: many sports responded by getting as many kids through the door as possible without any thought about how to engage and inspire. No wonder youngsters stayed home the moment the subsidies ran dry.
Most people involved in sport know all this, but there is a conspiracy of silence that has long surrounded the gravy train. Elite athletes are lined up to defend the quangos who provide them with cash, while politicians make lofty pronouncements about the value of sport, such as during the lamentable debate on basketball in parliament last week. Nobody mentions the unmentionable.
And the truth is that the failure of policy is even more abject than the data, on a superficial reading, might suggest. The few success stories are in precisely those areas outside the original remit of Sport England. The writer and campaigner Russell Findlay highlights that the boom in gym memberships is due to entrepreneurs combining low-cost memberships with innovative facilities. The highly successful Parkrun concept was created not by bureaucrats, but local people. Cycling has grown, too, not least because of safer pathways.
Sport England has tried to take retrospective credit for these successes. It recently altered its remit to focus not just on organised sport, where it has serially failed, but physical exercise more generally. What it has not realised is that it is always behind the curve because the world is changing, people’s habits are altering, and a centralised structure can’t keep up. Like many quangos, Sport England is world-class — not at driving outcomes but at finding ever more creative ways to justify its existence.
And this articulates the deepest problem of all. When it comes to public money, we too often think in terms of inputs rather than outputs. Pundits demonstrate their commitment to sport by calling for more cash. Ministers parade their credentials by talking about the recent million-pound cheque they signed. Can you imagine a business talking in this way? Entrepreneurs are not interested in inputs but outputs. Otherwise they go out of business.
Sport England and its vast web of “client” organisations should be put out of business. The sole achievement has been to redistribute wealth from those who don’t play organised sport to those who do, with a vast deadweight loss associated with bureaucracy created to administer the transfer. Future policy should focus more on entrepreneurs with subsidies tied to accountability, clear incentives, and a keener recognition of the unintended consequences.
The only question is whether Matt Hancock, the secretary of state for digital, culture, media and sport, has the courage to confront the vested interests of one of Britain’s most powerful and parasitical lobbies.
It's the kind of thing that might be an ECF Board agenda item - where Board members review and absorb the points made in the piece, and ask themselves whether anything sounds familiar. I don't suppose this will happen. But who knows. Anyway, read on. See if you find anything to reflect upon >>>> [full text from the Times (£) ]
______________________________________________________
I hesitate to say this; it won’t go down well with friends. Sport, after all, represents a close-knit family and many are on the payroll. The truth, however, is indisputable: government largesse towards sport has proved to be nothing more than an expensive displacement exercise, a distraction, a sustained exercise in political virtue signalling.
A bit of background. Sport was one of the designated good causes of the National Lottery in 1994. Sport England, a vast quango, was given the brief to increase participation. The idea was that a group of officials operating out of an office near Whitehall could somehow alter the behaviour of people in Brixton and Brighton. For most of the first decade, more than 34 per cent of their budget was spent on officials, offices and reports; so-called “administrative overhead”.
Expensive facilities were created, but underutilised. Local authority funding was squeezed. Sports activists were forced to learn a new vocabulary of “whole sports plans” and “community assets funding”. But it was difficult to tell whether any of this was having an impact. Coaches and other activists seemed more focused on accessing public subsidy than inspiring people to play and compete. I heard of organisations offering bribes to participants to artificially boost their numbers.
In 2005, Sport England took a belated decision to measure outcomes. A polling company was commissioned to assess the number of adults participating in three sessions of sport per week by making tens of thousands of phone calls. It was called the Active People survey, which cost around £5 million annually to collate, but the results were entirely predictable. The numbers participating in sport plateaued despite all the grandiose rhetoric.
Sport England responded by changing the goalposts. Instead of targeting the number of people playing at least three times a week, it moved to a target of at least once a week. Despite the expensive boost of a home Olympics, an event that was supposed to turbocharge participation, activity declined according to this criterion, too. By 2016, the last year of the Active People survey, 15.8 million people played sport at least once week, a fall of 0.4 per cent since 2012.
Not all sports funding is directed at participation, of course. UK Sport is the body that focuses on elite athletes. It has proved highly successful when it comes to Olympic triumphs, although there is a healthy debate about whether this is a legitimate area of public spending. Critics point out that elite success does little to inspire people to take up sport. “It is like supposing you can inspire a new generation of guitar players by getting them to watch Jimi Hendrix,” Barrie Houlihan, professor of sport at Loughborough University, has said. This is particularly true of the Winter Olympics, where precious few could pop out to try bobsleigh, even if they wanted to.
Defenders of UK Sport respond that even if elite success does not drive participation, it generates national pride. They point to the joy that surrounded the London 2012 and Rio 2016 Olympics. They say that this is a sensible area of spending. As I said, a healthy debate.
But that is the devastating point about Sport England: there can be no legitimate debate. Whatever the health and social benefits of sport, these cannot accrue if public spending does not move the needle of participation in the first place. Over the past 25 years, billions have been spent without any impact. Indeed, the spending probably undermined participation by forcing coaches, who could have been doing creative work, to navigate the complex funding landscape devised by a central bureaucracy utterly detached from the real world.
You can glimpse these ironies by looking at basketball, a recent cause célèbre. Politicians and pundits have called for more money to be given to a sport that has many participants from poorer and ethnic backgrounds. On its own terms, this argument is not without merit, but it utterly misses the deeper point. The only way that public spending on basketball can impact participation, ethnic or otherwise, is if such spending works, which it hasn’t.
Despite millions of pounds funnelled to Basketball England, participation has plummeted. The number of adults playing each month dropped by almost 100,000 between 2008 and 2016. This should come as no surprise. Basketball England is another dysfunctional body addicted to subsidy. Why should we expect the sport to thrive if its officials are incompetent and there is no mechanism to drive competition and innovation?
The social benefits of sport are, by the way, less clearcut than often claimed. If you are taught by coaches who are undermotivated, or who embody poor values, you are not going to reap a social dividend. Evidence suggests that sport only has positive consequences if the coaches are outstanding mentors and leaders. This was another problem with the crude targeting of participation: many sports responded by getting as many kids through the door as possible without any thought about how to engage and inspire. No wonder youngsters stayed home the moment the subsidies ran dry.
Most people involved in sport know all this, but there is a conspiracy of silence that has long surrounded the gravy train. Elite athletes are lined up to defend the quangos who provide them with cash, while politicians make lofty pronouncements about the value of sport, such as during the lamentable debate on basketball in parliament last week. Nobody mentions the unmentionable.
And the truth is that the failure of policy is even more abject than the data, on a superficial reading, might suggest. The few success stories are in precisely those areas outside the original remit of Sport England. The writer and campaigner Russell Findlay highlights that the boom in gym memberships is due to entrepreneurs combining low-cost memberships with innovative facilities. The highly successful Parkrun concept was created not by bureaucrats, but local people. Cycling has grown, too, not least because of safer pathways.
Sport England has tried to take retrospective credit for these successes. It recently altered its remit to focus not just on organised sport, where it has serially failed, but physical exercise more generally. What it has not realised is that it is always behind the curve because the world is changing, people’s habits are altering, and a centralised structure can’t keep up. Like many quangos, Sport England is world-class — not at driving outcomes but at finding ever more creative ways to justify its existence.
And this articulates the deepest problem of all. When it comes to public money, we too often think in terms of inputs rather than outputs. Pundits demonstrate their commitment to sport by calling for more cash. Ministers parade their credentials by talking about the recent million-pound cheque they signed. Can you imagine a business talking in this way? Entrepreneurs are not interested in inputs but outputs. Otherwise they go out of business.
Sport England and its vast web of “client” organisations should be put out of business. The sole achievement has been to redistribute wealth from those who don’t play organised sport to those who do, with a vast deadweight loss associated with bureaucracy created to administer the transfer. Future policy should focus more on entrepreneurs with subsidies tied to accountability, clear incentives, and a keener recognition of the unintended consequences.
The only question is whether Matt Hancock, the secretary of state for digital, culture, media and sport, has the courage to confront the vested interests of one of Britain’s most powerful and parasitical lobbies.
