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Chair’s Opinion

Posted on by Heidi Bellamy Posted in Chair's Opinion

Mark Allman, Chair of CLOA urges members to feedback on the
New Strategy for Sport: Consultation Paper.

As you will no doubt have seen the Government are seeking comments from the wider Sporting community on their new Sports Strategy, 13 years after the last sports strategy was published.  Much has moved on since this last publication notably the 2012 London Olympics and the impact of austerity within the public sector.

CLOA will be seeking to submit its own feedback to the consultation paper, which covers 10 key themes, these being:

  1. Participation
  2. Physical activity
  3. Children and young people
  4. Financial sustainability
  5. Coaching, workforce and good governance
  6. Elite and professional sport
  7. Infrastructure
  8. Fairness and equality
  9. Safety and wellbeing
  10. International influence and major sporting events

I would strongly encourage members to reply individually in addition to CLOA drawing together its own response, but in doing so I believe it would be really helpful if members could start sharing their key headline thoughts and observations as soon as possible. This will make our collective responses that much stronger. To that end I therefore suggest we use the Members LinkedIn Forum to share thoughts.

There are some themes that are clearly more relevant to us, but we must encourage Government not to simply look at local authorities as providers of infrastructure. We have a more pivotal role to play across for example the themes of participation, physical activity, children and young people, financial sustainability, fairness and equality, coaching workforce and good governance in particular.

We know the existing system can be improved upon, with recent Active People Survey figures suggesting a decline in numbers taking part. I believe that good, proactive LA’s can be at the heart of driving up participation locally; after all we have the partners and insight locally. I would urge you to share your views and bring forward as many constructive comments as possible aligned to the questions asked within the consultation document. This is an opportunity we must embrace.

Consultation closes on Friday 2 October 2015.

Mark Allman, Chair of CLOA

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