Sports Facility Calculator



Sports Facility Calculator

User Instructions

June 2013

The Sports Facility Calculator (SFC) has been created by Sport England to help local planning authorities quantify how much additional demand for the key community sports facilities, is generated by populations of new growth, development and regeneration areas.

The SFC was first developed to help estimate the facility needs of the new communities in the Eastern Quarry Development, Dartford, and the Milton Keynes future growth areas. It has been used to help local authorities in infrastructure planning, s.106 and Supplementary Planning Documents.

The Sports Facility Calculator has been designed to be as flexible as possible to allow a range of scenario’s to be considered, both simply and quickly.

The key functions of the SFC are;

• Expresses demand as facilities, e.g., 400m2 of water

• Uses local authority population profiles projected at LA level to 2012 from the 2001 Census, updated by 2008 mid year estimates projected to current year and for London GLA 2009 projections at ward level for London Plan for current year.

• Allow you to create your own population profile

• Ability to test out the effect of changes in levels of participation

• Converts need for facilities into £’s.

• Includes up to date regional building cost variations

Whilst the SFC can be used to estimate the facility needs for whole area populations, such as for a whole local authorities, there are dangers in how these figures are subsequently used at this level in matching it with current supply for strategic gap analysis.

The SFC should not be used for strategic gap analysis; this approach is fundamentally flawed. The SFC has no spatial dimension. The figure that is produced is a total demand figure for the chosen population. It is important to note that the SFC does not take account of:

1. Facility location compared to demand

2. Capacity and availability of facilities - opening hours

3. Cross boundary movement of demand

4. Travel networks and topography

5. Attractiveness of facilities

For these reasons total demand figure generated by the SFC should not simply be compared with facilities within the same area. Other tools and techniques are available, such as the Facilities Planning Model, and access to these can be obtained through Sport England’s local offices.

The SFC is best used to quantify the demand for specific community sports facilities that a specific/discrete area’s population would generate. Once this demand has been quantified, it will be up to the local planning authority to decide how this new demand could be met, which could be through existing facilities, improvements to existing facilities or new facilities. Where appropriate this could be achieved through a financial contribution from the development.

Understanding what the figures mean

It’s important to understand what the SFC figures mean. In coming to the amount of sports facilities a given population would generate, the SFC uses parameters developed for the Facility Planning Model to calculate how many visits in a week in the peak period the population would generate for a sports hall, swimming pool, artificial grass pitch(agp) and indoor bowls centre. In order for this number to be meaningful, it then converts these number of visits into the equivalent size of facilities to meet this demand.

It’s important to remember that although the calculations are based on the peak period, the process also assumes that the additional facilities are open for community use throughout the whole week (typically over 80 hrs per week), including both peak and off peak periods. Planning to meet the demands of the new population using facilities which are not typically open for the whole week will need to be taken into account.

For example, if a new development generated the need for a 4 court sports hall, which it is planned to be met by a dual use facility on a school site, community use may only be in after school hours, say 30 hrs per week, which would obviously be significantly short of the 40 hours in the peak period, never mind the 80 hours of total community access needed.

If you experience difficulty with using the SFC, please contact your local Sport England Office, who will help you with its use.

Disclaimer

Sport England has made all reasonable endeavours to ensure the accuracy of the material contained in this calculator. The Calculator has been produced in good faith and Sport England does not accept any liability that may come from the use of it. The use of the Calculator is entirely at the users own risk and Sport England does not accept any liable caused from its use. If you are unsure as to how use the calculator, or do not understand the results, you must contact Sport England at one of our local offices.

Instructions

To Download the SFC from the Sport England web site, first open the SFC front page. This page contains the link to the SFC download page together with more information on the SFC and how best to use it.

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When you are ready to download the SFC, click on the link to the download page on the right hand side.

Download the SFC

This page, not only includes the link to download the SFC, but also these User Instructions together with the File Extraction instructions.

It is important that the user understands what the SFC can used for before downloading the file.

In order download the SFC you will need to follow the instructions on the download page. It is important to understand that the SFC needs to be correctly extracted from the Zip File. If it is not, it will not open correctly. The File Extraction instructions can be found within the Documents section at the bottom of this page.

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In order to make sure you always have the latest version of the SFC, once the file is opened it will function for 90 days. You can save this file offline, however, once the file passes its 90 day life, you will need to download another version from the website.

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On this main page you will see the version of the SFC and the date of build costs and population base that are included in the SFC. It will also count down how many days are left before the SFC expires.

The population data used in the SFC is from the Office for National Statistics Census data. This provides the population profile that is used in the SFC.

Click Accept and the SFC will open up on the Front page and will look like the page below.

You will see the calculator has 4 steps. You only have to change, or enter the yellow boxes.

The Steps are;

Step 1 – Select Local Authority

Step 2 – Enter Population

Step 3 – Cost Variations

Step 4 – Adjust Demand

Underneath Step 4 are the ‘Facility Requirements’ for the 4 Facility types and the needs which are based on the population for the area selected in Steps 1 & 2.

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The pyramid chart shows the population profile of England, and changes to show the population profile of the local authority area selected in Step 1. The red line indicated the national profile. When the calculator is opened, it will automatically open up with ‘England’ selected in the yellow box under ‘Step 1’.

Steps 1 - Choose your local authority area

The first step is to select your local authority area, or the area which the new development is located in. Click onto the yellow box under “Step 1”, and select the name of the local authority, by scrolling through the drop down box.

This will call up the population profile for the selected local authority. This uses the 2001 census updated by 2008 mid-year estimates at lSOA /MSOA level then modified by ONS 2008-based sub national population projections at la level for 2012 London boroughs modified by GLA 2009 round low projections at ward level for London plan for 2012.

When you select your local authority area you will notice that the pyramid will change to the profile of your area.

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Step 2 - Enter new population total

The SFC is a useful tool to help estimate and quantify the facility needs that would be generated from any given population. This is specifically useful in helping to determine the additional sports facilities that would be generated to meet the needs of, say new housing proposal.

You can now change the population total by entering a new total on the yellow box in Step 2. This calculates the equivalent amount of the 4 sports facilities that this population would generate the need for if the population was the same as the existing population profile of Luton.

In the example below, housing growth in Luton with a total population of 10,000 would indicate that this new population would create the need for just over 100m2 of water space.

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It should be noted that how this additional sports facility provision is met needs to be considered against the level of provision within the area.

Step 3 - Cost Variations

Step 3 allows you to see what the financial value of this additional facility need would be at today’s costs. This is on a pro-rata basis.

When the SFC is opened this is automatically set to No Costs. To turn this function on, click on to the yellow box with No Costs, select Automatic from the drop down box. This will provide a pro-rata cost of the facilities identified in the Facility Requirements box.

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In this example, the pro rata cost of 109m2 of waterspace is estimated at £1,571,304. This cost calculation automatically includes the latest regional building cost variations based on the Building Costs Information Services, of The Royal Institute of Chartered Surveyors. These costs are updated through the year, together with the regional building cost variations.

Step 4 – Adjust Demand

Step 4 gives you the ability to consider the impact of changes to demand for the 4 sports facilities. This could reflect sport development policies and programmes within an area that could drive up the demand for use of facilities. This reflects the fact that sports development policies may apply differently to different activities, each facility type has its own drop down box the adjust demand.

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In our example for the 10,000 person-housing proposal, if there was a 20% increase in today’s expected demand, this would increasing the need for water space to by 20m2, which equates to an additional £314,000.

It is important to note that the SFC works on population totals. For housing proposals and development, the total population of individual sites will need to be estimated, for instance, average occupancy may be estimated at 2.5 people per house for an area. Estimating the occupancy rate correctly is obviously important in order to establish the correct total population of the housing development/specific area population.

Creating your own Population Profile

The SFC works by applying nationally derived demand rates to the existing local population profile of your chosen area in Step 1. If, however, you are looking new development proposals that will have a different population profile than the existing area, for instance, the proposal will cater for young families. The SFC allows you to create your own population profile through the User Profiles.

To do this, select User Profile 1, or User Profile 2 from the Step 1 drop down list.

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Next, tick onto the ’User Profile’ tab. You then need to create the population profile for the area you are looking at. To do this, simply add the numbers of people within each cohort. Note: it may be easier to use the same total as you have added in Step 2, in this case they should add up to 10,000.

What the SFC then does, is uses your User profile for the population and applies the demand parameters used in the Calculator.

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Taking the earlier example, the 10,000 population may be focused on young families with the majority, being between 25-50 age bands. This population has been split across these age cohorts, giving a different population profile for the surrounding Luton area. The SFC will apply the national usage parameters to this new population profile for the 10,000 to give you the facility needs of this new profiled community.

When you have filled in new profile, tick back on to the Front tab and you will see that your new profile will show up in the pyramid chart. You can now use this profile for any of the calculations by filling in the population in Step 2.

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Note –to use costs function for the User Profile 1 you will have to select the area where your new population will be located. To do this, click the yellow box in Step 3, select ‘Select County’, a drop down box will appear, select the County where the new development will be located, this will then apply the building variation costs for your selected county, to your new population profile. This list contains County areas and London Boroughs which reflects the variation in building costs across the country.

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Remember – after using User Profile 1, if you want to select another local authority area, you will need to change the Cost variations in Step 3 back to either No Costs, or Automatic. If you do not do this, you will apply the cost variations for the country you selected when working with your User Profile totals.

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Facilities Requirements

Please note that the following Facilities are used in the Facility Requirements boxes:

Pools = a four lane Pool

Halls = a four court Sports Hall

Indoor Bowls = a 6 rink Centre

AGP = a full size Pitch

vpwpp = Visits per week in the peak period – this is used in Sport England’s facility modelling. For further information please contact Sport England.

June13v9

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