Nottingham City Council has today formally adopted two new strategies for the city: a new Playing Pitch Strategy, and a Sports & Physical Activity Strategy. Both strategies have been developed by the Council’s Sport & Leisure service in partnership with Sport England, the National Governing Bodies of Sport and Sport Nottinghamshire, and aim to get more people more active more often.
The Playing Pitch Strategy provides direction on:
- planning guidance to assess development proposals affecting playing fields and existing outdoor sports areas across the city
- a strategic framework to provide and manage outdoor sports across the city
- support for external funding bids for outdoor sports facilities
- ongoing monitoring and review of the use, distribution, function, quality and accessibility of outdoor sport.
Nottingham City Council’s Sports & Physical Activity Strategy (2015 – 2019) sets out the way forward for providing leisure facilities and developing and delivering sport and physical activity in the city. The primary focus of the Sports & Physical Activity Strategy is encouraging the least active people in Nottingham to become active, aiming to significantly increase the number of physically active adults in the city. In turn, this contributes to achieving the Council’s ambitions of improving health, employability, economic development and community cohesion.
Over the past ten years, Nottingham City Council has undertaken a £40m leisure transformation programme, resulting in high quality leisure centres across the city. Harvey Hadden Sports Village, the final centre benefiting from the transformation programme, fully reopens to the public this September. By 2019 Nottingham aims to supplement the Council owned/managed leisure centres with a complementary network of community-based indoor and outdoor sports and exercise based facilities that make sport and physical activity accessible to people from the whole community.
Cllr Dave Trimble, Portfolio Holder for Leisure and Culture, said:
“Nottingham City Council’s Sport & Leisure Service has done a sterling job over the last few years, improving the quality of our leisure centre facilities, building strong partnerships with organisations like Sport England, and securing funding through initiatives like City of Football. As a result, people in Nottingham now have better access to opportunities and facilities to help them exercise and be active. The Playing Pitch Strategy and the Sports & Physical Activity Strategy announced today aim to build on this success so that over the next four years even more people are able to be more active more often.”