East Riding of Yorkshire Council provides its sport, play and arts service and its leisure service inhouse. Other models have been considered and trialled in the past, such as outsourcing, but the services demonstrate high levels of success under the in-house mechanism.
East Riding of Yorkshire Council’s leisure service is successfully reducing its overall cost and increasing the number of participants and overall service income levels. It makes a significant contribution to the local health and wellbeing agenda and works with a broad range of partners.
The council’s separate sport, play and arts service enables and supports the targeted development of quality sport, play, physical activity and arts opportunities. It works to address a range of cross-cutting agendas that fit with the council’s priority outcomes, particularly ‘promoting health, wellbeing and independence’ and ‘supporting vulnerable people, reducing inequalities’.
- Partnership working has been crucial to the success of both service areas. Several key partnerships have helped drive them forward:
- Public health: the leisure service has attained a position with healthcare providers that has resulted in high level of commissioning and awareness of what it can offer. Leisure is currently commissioned to about £800,000 each year and covers areas such as the NHS Live Well programme, GP referral, health checks and health optimisation.
- The sport, play and arts service is commissioned by public health via a service level agreement (£131,000 annually) to deliver a range of programmes to engage vulnerable and hard-to-reach groups.
- Hull University provides high-level research that helps develop the health schemes and also measurements that show the impact of the leisure service on health and wellbeing. This work is due to be published.
- The sport, play and arts service is a key partner within Active Humber, the county sports partnership for the sub region.
- The sport, play and arts service is commissioned by School Sports Partnerships to deliver a high-quality coaching and teacher training package for primary, secondary and special schools in the East Riding, with a focus on nontraditional sport such as outdoor adventure skills, healthy lifestyle workshops and play leaders.
- The sport, play and arts service supports sports clubs to develop and improve and provides advice and support on gaining accreditation, funding, recruiting volunteers and starting a junior section. It also manages the East Riding Club Accreditation Scheme.
Impact and outcomes
The cost of East Riding’s leisure service has reduced by about £1.2 million over the past nine years, while the number of visits to leisure facilities has increased dramatically – from 3,569,009 in 2008/09 to 5,371,013 in 2016/17.
The approach of the sport, play and arts service is to promote prevention, early intervention and co-production using a community asset model. The service influences positive behaviour change by consulting, empowering and working with individuals and groups to develop their skills, knowledge and confidence to make positive changes.
The sport, play and arts service had a core budget of £661,000 in 2017/18. Due to planned savings, this will reduce to £561,000 in 2018/19.
The service levers in a substantial amount of external funding and commissioned work. In 2017/18 this is £364,000 which is used to fund fixed-term contracts and other programme delivery costs. There are currently 12 different funders, of which public health is the largest, which commission the service to deliver against a wide range of cross-cutting outcomes. Councillor Jonathan Owen, Chairman of the East Riding Health and Wellbeing Board, said: “We have been very innovative in our approach to sport and leisure services through focussing on customers and building service provision. This has generated the momentum to bring together many local partners to improve the customer journey whilst making the most of the resources available. So, for example, we know that the health interventions we have with customers create a healthy community as well as saving long-term costs for the NHS.”
Looking to the future
Future plans include:
- Continuing with capital investment in the leisure facilities to ensure that the council has a strong sport and leisure portfolio.
- Ensuring the level of health commissioning remains high and the outcomes and effects on the community are measured and articulated.
- Striving to make any further savings required, to maximise commissioning opportunities and to seek ways of becoming more commercial and bring in additional income. Key learning points
- Keep as close to the customer as possible to enhance each and every customer journey.
- Councils cannot do it alone – partnerships make it happen.
- Make efforts to attract external and internal funding/commissioning linked closely with the council’s corporate priorities.
Contact
Ian Rayner
Interim Head of Culture and Customer Service
East Riding of Yorkshire Council
[email protected]