Producing Red Card to Red Tape - The author's view

I’m not ashamed to admit that I am known by the rest of the policy team at the Sport and Recreation Alliance as the fact monkey. I like facts and I love finding out what people think. So when the Alliance was asked to review the legislation and red tape holding back sport and recreation clubs (the report that would eventually become Red Card to Red Tape) I got very excited. In minutes my mind ran away with me and was elaborately devising a strategy for visiting every club in the UK to seek out and understand the burdens they faced - I would leave no stone unturned! Thankfully the rest of the policy team were there to keep me anchored in reality, but they did agree we should be as thorough as possible. 

 

And so began the most comprehensive piece of research I have undertaken for the Sport and Recreation Alliance. Admittedly we could have narrowed the scope of the research, but this seemed like too good an opportunity to find out as much as we could about the real issues for clubs, and I like a challenge. So we set our sights high, and I definitely got my challenge! 

 

We started with a long list of potential regulatory issues and topics that we knew about anecdotally. The first step was to find out what these regulations entailed, which piece of legislation they were borne from and how they were intended (or in some cases, unintended) to impact on sport. After all, we couldn’t ask other people about things we didn’t understand ourselves, even if it meant that the statute law database website made its way into ‘favourites’ on my internet browser. Hmm, perhaps this is something I am a little ashamed of!

 

When it came to finding out what people thought, we had to start with the clubs so that we could hear from volunteers about the burdens they were coming up against. However, we also knew we would need perspective on what they said, so talking to national governing bodies was just as important and a logical next step. We also knew (not that Joy, our Compliance Officer would let us forget!) that good governance shouldn’t be ignored, so it was important to consider why legislation was in place, and what would actually work for clubs when it needed to be there. We then had to bring everything we had found out together into one coherent story. Those 15 words make it sound beautifully simple, but this was the tough part. Hours, no, days, no, weeks of work went into this, and it was really important at this stage to get lots of experts involved to ensure that we didn’t miss anything, or worse, get anything wrong. 

 

Despite all the hard work the result has been more than worth it - the Alliance, clubs and governing bodies alike believe the report to be relevant and comprehensive, with recommendations that can bring about progress for sport and recreation. I also see the report as a fantastic reference tool for our policy work. In fact, I’ve been thinking of suggesting that everyone at the Alliance learns Red Card to Red Tape until they can recite it from memory… all 200 pages of it!

Syann Cox
Research and Evidence Officer at the Sport and Recreation Alliance

More information on the Review, including the full report and executive summary, photos of the launch and a 'how to' guide on lobbying you MP can be found on the Red Card webpage.