Alliance response to UK Sport funding consultation

The Sport and Recreation Alliance has this week issued its response to UK Sport’s consultation on the future of elite athlete funding after the Rio Olympic and Paralympic cycle.

The response follows a number of detailed conversations the Alliance has conducted with its members and seeks to provide a view to UK Sport which takes into account a wide range of opinions across the sector.

Here is a summary of our full response, which can be found here.

It’s clear for all to see that UK Sport’s unrelenting focus on performance has delivered fantastic results over recent years in terms of medals won and performances delivered by GB athletes. The Alliance firmly supports this focus on performance and also strongly supports the emphasis on ensuring the highest standards are set and upheld across sport. We would welcome a strong focus on ensuring that the highest standards of governance are met in the funding and delivery of performance sport, whilst at the same time taking opportunity to streamline the current requirements.

That being said, with £380m of public funding being invested into 45 Olympic and Paralympic sports for both the summer and winter cycle, we feel any future strategy must recognise that sport takes place on a continuum which stretches from the grassroots to talent development to the podium. As such, an overarching view of the funding of sport in the UK should be taken, rather than a focus on elite success in isolation. By the same token, we feel that any future UK Sport strategy should be viewed holistically, taking the funding and regulatory requirements of individual Home Country Sports Councils into account. This is because decisions in one area will have an impact for the sports concerned in other areas too. As such, we feel it would be better to have an all-encompassing debate about the approach to sports funding, rather than a focus on elite success in isolation.

As an organisation that represents over 320 members and organisations within sport, we believe that funding should be distributed to a wider variety of sports, including non-Olympic and non-Paralympic activities, where world-class success is possible. We believe that these non-Olympic and Paralympic successes can be just as much a cause for national celebration and that we should consider how we can make more of them. There should also be recognition that some of these sports are growing quickly and that seed funding may be necessary to put us in a place to compete beyond the current cycles of funding. We also recognise the weaknesses of the current system in terms of funding team sports and believe that this should be addressed, not least because some of these team sports are supported by large participation bases which have potential to grow further given elite success.

Findings from the consultation will be presented to the UK Sport Board in February, ahead of the 2017-2021 Investment Principles being finalised and agreed with Board and Government over the spring of 2015. Sports will be invited to start work on their business cases for investment in the 2017-2021 funding cycle in the summer of 2015.

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