Suffolk Facility Strategy

These are exciting and challenging times for sports facility provision in Suffolk! The excitement comes from the huge opportunities afforded by factors such as London 2012, the growth agenda in the County (particularly within the Ipswich area, but also in the ports of Lowestoft and Felixstowe and the Building Schools for the Future programme. The challenges include the need to re-invest in the existing (and in many cases ageing) stock of facilities; the need to ensure that new facilities are in the right location, meet the highest standards in terms of quality and are fully accessible to all sectors of the population and the need to meet the sports facility requirements for those Suffolk residents living in remote rural areas.

Many existing facilities do not meet 21st century standards in terms of quality and accessibility and have suffered from a lack of long term investment. The County also lacks facilities capable of staging or supporting major sporting events and capable of supporting the needs of some elite athletes.

This strategy has been prepared by Strategic Leisure on behalf of Sport England, supported locally by Suffolk Sport, the County Sports Partnership. It will help to guide the response to the opportunities and challenges referred to above. It sets out the findings from an assessment of the current stock of facilities within Suffolk, and identifies priorities for future action. Finally, it examines how future facility provision can be successfully delivered. It builds on the recently produced Regional Sports Facilities Strategy (Sport England, November 2007) but gives more detail at local district level on the specific facility needs. It has involved close partnership working within the county by bodies such as local authorities and county representatives of national governing bodies of sport.

Further work will be necessary at district level, however, to look in more detail at localised spatial variations with regard to the supply and demand of facilities and the impact of proposed housing growth.

The delivery issue will not be easy. It will require a partnership approach to working across different local authorities and involving agencies with differing remits. Different approaches to funding sports facilities will need to be developed. However, the target remains the same – to ensure that Suffolk develops a high quality stock of sports facilities over the next 10-15 years that will meet the needs of all residents and sports participants in the county and be capable of both driving and accommodating the growth in sports participation that we all strive for.

The vision therefore for the strategy is:

“To ensure provision of a network of high-quality and accessible community and specialist sports facilities for all people within Suffolk that will support facilitation of opportunities to ensure that Suffolk is recognised as a physically active and successful sporting County, and a County where elite athletes have the opportunity to train and compete.”

An assessment of community and sport specific facility needs was carried out across the county, involving the use of Sport England strategic planning tools and consultation with key partners such as Local Authorities and National Governing Bodies of Sport.

For more detailed information on the strategy please refer to the documents accessible on this page.

To view the appendices to the full report click here