Politics Home Article | Getting people active: a national movement, powered locally

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There are over 30 million active adults in England, but nearly 12 million are not active enough – and inactivity is more common in areas facing higher levels of social need.

To close the national physical activity gap, we need to think locally.

The people and organisations closest to communities understand their needs, have the relationships to engage people, and are best placed to shape solutions that work for them.

But local action to get more people active does not happen in a vacuum. The most effective approach combines local knowledge, relationships, and leadership with national evidence, expertise, investment, and support.

That balance matters as the government looks to shift power closer to communities and ensure national funding works harder for them.

The opportunity is huge: create the conditions for places to lead, equip them with the support, learning and resources they need, and turn community action into meaningful impact – with the potential to drive national change.

Getting more people active cannot be achieved by one organisation alone. It depends on what happens in the places where people live: the opportunities available to them, how organisations work together and whether communities themselves have a meaningful role in shaping what happens.

That is why our place-based work starts with communities – but is supported nationally. Through National Lottery and Exchequer investment, we are working in partnership with communities across England where inactivity levels are highest, supporting our local partners to create the conditions for more people to get active where they live.

The starting point is understanding what life is like in each place.

Local people understand their communities better than anyone. They know what works, what does not, the resources that are available, which places feel welcoming and what gets in the way of being active. They also know the strengths that already exist – the people, organisations, spaces and relationships that can make a difference.

That insight cannot simply be delivered from the centre. It comes from listening to communities and understanding what shapes activity and inactivity in different places.

But local insight is most powerful when it is combined with evidence, learning and expertise from elsewhere, alongside the investment needed to turn it into action and impact.

Connecting places facing similar challenges and creating opportunities to learn from what is working elsewhere can help local partners build the confidence and capacity to develop approaches that work for their communities.

The result is a national movement powered by local action. And we can see how this approach works in practice.

In Doncaster, more than 2,500 residents have helped create a community-run “Friends of” group that now independently delivers physical activity events in local parks.

In Blackpool, a youth leadership programme, co-designed with 16- to 17-year-olds, has brought young people into leadership spaces to help shape decisions about activity in their community.

These examples look different because the places themselves are different. That is precisely the point.

Place-based working is not about taking the same programme everywhere. It is about understanding what needs to change in each place and giving partners the freedom and support to make it happen. The national role is not to prescribe the solution, but to create the conditions for those solutions to succeed.

That flexibility matters particularly in communities where inactivity is closely connected to wider inequalities.

Our Active Lives research shows that just 53.8 per cent of adults in the least affluent groups are active, compared with 73.2 per cent of the most affluent. There are also significant inequalities in activity levels among disabled people, older adults and some ethnic minority communities.

These differences cannot be explained by motivation alone. Cost, transport, safety, caring responsibilities, confidence and access to facilities and green spaces can all influence whether someone is active.

Local knowledge is essential to understanding those barriers. But tackling them also requires sustained investment, shared evidence, specialist expertise and the ability to learn across places.

There is, of course, a wider prize. Physical activity can improve health and wellbeing, strengthen social connections and help people feel more connected to where they live.  It can also make a significant contribution to reducing pressure on public services. Our research shows that active lifestyles could prevent more than 3.3m cases of chronic health conditions each year, including depression, back pain and type 2 diabetes, delivering an estimated £8bn in direct net savings to the healthcare system.

Realising those benefits requires more than providing opportunities to be active. It requires communities to bring knowledge, trust and lived experience; local organisations to bring relationships and leadership; and national organisations to bring evidence, expertise, investment, accountability and the ability to connect learning across the country.

Localism works best when places are empowered to lead, backed by a national system that helps them learn, invest and deliver – turning local action into national impact.