Planning for Sport and Active Recreation Facilities ... - Brent Council

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This chapter describes Sport England’s various planning tools that
have been used in chapter six to assess levels of supply and demand
for indoor and outdoor facilities within Brent.
To help analyse whether the levels of current provision and provision
in future years will be sufficient to meet population demands, Sport
England has developed a number of strategic planning tools to
help assess demand and provision. As each planning tool method
assesses and calculates demand and provision in a different way it is
important that the information arising from a number of the tools is
used to inform strategic priorities and that readers do not just focus
on the findings of just one tool. Therefore a variety of Sport England’s
planning tools have been used to inform this strategy.
Sports Facility Planning Tools – Descriptions
and Definitions.
Active Places Power - Capacity Ratios
Sport England’s comprehensive nationwide database of sports
facilities ‘Active Places Power’ allows the generation of a ‘Capacity
Ratio’ based upon the frequency of a particular facility per 1000
population within a local authority ward or borough. The Capacity
Ratio gives an indication of current provision levels in relation to
the existing population, which can then be compared against local,
regional and national averages i.e. ‘x’ m2 facility provision per 1000
population. The table provides capacity ratios based on current levels
of facility provision but calculates this against population figures from
2001, 2011 and 2016.
When comparing Brent’s capacity ratios with London and nationally it
only compares calculations with current provision against population
statistics from 2001. This will highlight any significant differences in
provision in Brent compared to average provision elsewhere. It is also
possible to calculate a Capacity Ratio based on Brent’s population
projections. However, this data cannot then be compared against
future regional and national averages as no such projections currently
exist. This method also only looks at capacity within each individual
Borough and does not take into consideration quality of provision or
use of facilities within neighbouring Boroughs
Accessibility – Choice and Opportunity.
Previous national surveys have identified that the majority of facility
users will travel for up to 20 minutes by foot in urban areas to attend
a generic sports facility. Thus it is possible to generate catchment
maps for each facility based on a 1.6km / 20 minute walking travel
distance. It is also possible to generate maps which show in more
detail how many minutes travel time by walking, parts of the
Borough are from specific facilities. By using these maps and plotting
the catchment of each facility it is easy to see at a glance those areas
where people are within easy reach of a specific sports facility and
those areas which are not. For more specialised sports facilities it is
recognised that people will travel considerably further.