'Places, People, Play', is a government run scheme deigned to enhance a new generations sporting chances in the run up to the Olympic games. This is done for a wide variety of reasons, some of which I will be looking at in this piece of work, here is an overview of what they do from their website.
"Places People Play is a £135m initiative that will bring the inspiration and magic of a home Olympic Games and Paralympic Games into the heart of local communities
It is being delivered by Sport England in partnership with the British Olympic Association, the British Paralympic Association and with the support of the London Organising Committee of the Olympic Games."
They state that they will transform the areas in which people play sport, they say they will do this using three different action plan.
Iconic facilities - investing in regionally-significant
multi-sport facilities that will represent best practice for the sector.
Inspired Facilities - modernising and extending clubs and opening up local facilities for community sport.
Protecting Playing Fields - protecting and improving hundreds of playing fields across the country, preserving high-quality spaces for local people to play and enjoy sport.
What do these actually mean?
Iconic Facilities - This is the section of the action plan that promotes new facilities being built in local communities. These will hopefully become regional hubs for major events in at least two sports or more. This should allow them to continue running after the programme has finished as they will be financially viable.
The overall aims of this project is to increase the level of sporting participants throughout the nation. This helps to ensure more people are leading a healthier lifestyle, which in turn, will cost the government less on health care bills. The facilities will be paid for by £30 million of capital National Lottery funding, plus partnership funding, over three £10 million funding rounds. This is to ensure that the facilities are not a momentary benefit, but that they benefit society for many years to come. They targeted investment in up to 25 Iconic Facilities will create a network of multi-sport facilities of regional significance delivering both local and regional sporting opportunities
All projects are required to measure their performance by monitoring participants and throughput achieved on an annual basis.
Inspired Facility - "Inspired Facilities is focused on making it easier for local community and volunteer groups to improve and refurbish sports clubs or transform non-sporting venues into modern grassroots sport facilities." The purpose of this action plan is to make it a lot easier for groups of people to get funding for up to date modern facilities which they feel would be beneficial to the local community. They aim is to spread over £50,000,000 of Lottery money to over 1000 different projects to increase participation rates nationwide by 2014.
Protecting Playing Fields - "Playing fields are vital to a vibrant grassroots sports environment, and this programme will enhance the role Sport England already plays in protecting playing fields, by securing the future of many sites for a minimum of 25 years, and helping communities realize the sporting benefits of playing field land." The purpose of this programme is not to provide new facilities, but to keep many of the high quality facilities children already have, but that could be under threat of being sold off for reasons such as housing. Funding wise it will operate with £10m National Lottery money plus partnership funding over five £2 million funding rounds, with two in 2011/12, two in 2012/13 and one in 2013/14. Partnership funding is required from a non-lottery source; ideally including a third party source. Local authorities will be required to match fund pound-for-pound, whilst sports clubs, community and voluntary sector projects will be required to identify an appropriate level of partnership funding. They aim to invest in and protect 400 playing field sites, creating a tangible legacy in the local community
