Sport England is taking another step towards measuring public leisure centres as health and wellbeing assets rather than simply counting visits and financial performance, with the launch of a new Active Wellbeing – Facilities Dashboard for its Moving Communities service.
The platform brings participation, demographics, financial and operational performance, customer experience and social value into one dashboard, enabling local authorities and operators to examine not only how facilities are performing, but also who they’re reaching and the wider value they’re generating.
The facilities arm of Moving Communities, which collects and analyses data from public leisure centres, is also migrating to 4GLOBAL’s InsightOS infrastructure, bringing it together with Moving Communities Place, which looks at physical activity across wider communities, creating a single platform for analysis at site, contract, regional and national level.
Moving Communities is now collecting data from more than 4,000 sites, including more than 1,600 leisure facilities and 2,400 community programmes, supported by more than 50 live system integrations.
The new dashboard will track a wide range of measures, including throughput and unique participants, participant demographics and activities, income and cost per visit, subsidy and cost recovery, utilities consumption and costs. Also tracked will be Quest performance and customer experience, including Net Promoter Score and satisfaction.
Importantly, these measures can now sit alongside estimates of the social value created by getting people active.
The change supports Sport England’s wider ambition to transition public leisure towards an ‘active wellbeing’ model, with closer links between leisure, health and social care and a greater emphasis on prevention, place and reducing inequalities.
The launch is part of the Active Wellbeing Facilities approach detailed in Sport England’s Future of Public Leisure report, which envisages public leisure facilities as community assets capable of generating physical, social and economic value, rather than simply buildings measured by visits and financial performance.
Future of Public Leisure identifies high-quality data and insight, environmental sustainability, stronger connections with health and digital transformation among the foundations needed to make that transition.
This makes the dashboard potentially more significant than a technology upgrade. If used effectively, it will allow decisions about facilities and investment to be based on a more rounded assessment of their contribution to communities, rather than predominantly on throughput, subsidy and cost recovery.
The distinction is significant. Sport England’s latest Moving Communities report estimates that 1,419 public leisure centres generated £3.63bn in social value between April 2023 and March 2025, while around half of sites on the platform broke even or better – illustrating why financial performance alone gives an incomplete picture of the contribution made.
Combined with the wider catchment profiling available through InsightOS, the dashboard could also help identify where apparently successful facilities are failing to reach sections of their communities.
This is important because Moving Communities data continues to show inequalities in participation. The latest Sport England figures show people from the 20 per cent most deprived areas accounted for 16 per cent of visits in 2024/25, compared with 24 per cent from the least deprived areas.
Emma Bernstein, strategic projects lead at Sport England, said: “Moving Communities has become an important evidence base for understanding participation and the role public leisure facilities play within communities.
“The Active Wellbeing – Facilities Dashboard takes this further by bringing together participation, social value, financial, operational and customer experience data in a much more connected way.
“This will help partners build a fuller picture of facility performance and impact, giving stronger evidence to improve services, understand who is active and importantly, who is not and to consistently demonstrate wider value and inform future investment.”
Putting a value on wellbeing
A significant part of the upgrade is wider access to Social Value Calculator 5.0.
The latest calculator is based on Sport England’s updated national model, developed with State of Life, Sheffield Hallam University and Manchester Metropolitan University.
Among the changes are the inclusion of children aged seven to 10 in wellbeing calculations, inequality-based valuations and updated healthcare, societal and productivity costs.
Sport England’s wider research estimates that community sport and physical activity generated £122.9bn of social value in England in 2023/24.
The figures are modelled estimates of social value rather than additional cash being released into NHS or local authority budgets. They comprise a monetary valuation of individual wellbeing benefits alongside estimated healthcare and wider societal savings.
Sport England says local estimates rely on assumptions and limitations, although the methodology can help organisations demonstrate impact, support funding applications and build investment cases.
Jack Shakespeare, recently appointed managing director at 4Global, said: “Understanding the true performance and value of public leisure and active wellbeing facilities requires us to look at much more than visits or financial measures alone.
“The Active Wellbeing Dashboard connects those different dimensions, bringing together who is using the facilities, who they are reaching, how they are performing and the social value they create.”
The migration to InsightOS will bring enhanced filtering, catchment profiling, faster processing and enhanced analysis and visualisation.
Perhaps most significantly, bringing the Place and Facilities elements of Moving Communities together should enable a more connected understanding of what happens inside leisure centres and patterns of physical activity across the communities they serve.
That could ultimately give local authorities a considerably more sophisticated answer to one of the most important questions facing public leisure: not simply how busy is a facility, but what difference is it making – and to whom?
From COVID recovery to sector intelligence
The development represents the latest stage in the evolution of Moving Communities, which was launched by Sport England in 2021 to measure the impact of the government’s £100m National Leisure Recovery Fund following the pandemic.
At the time, HCM described the initiative as potentially representing a step-change in the industry’s understanding of public leisure, with Active Insight’s Mike Hill saying it offered a “once in a lifetime opportunity” to create sector-wide data, insight and intelligence.
HCM’s original analysis of Moving Communities
The question of who benefits from public leisure has also been part of the debate from the outset. Writing in HCM in 2021, industry veteran Martyn Allison argued that collecting data would only be valuable if it revealed both who was benefiting from public leisure and who was being missed.
Read HCM’s 2021 analysis: Aiming for equality
Moving Communities has expanded substantially since then.
In 2024, HCM reported that its then-largest comparable sample covered 563 public leisure facilities, with participation rising by 7 per cent and fitness-related activities recording the largest increase, at 20 per cent.
Read HCM’s 2024 Moving Communities report
Sport England subsequently renewed the Moving Communities contract for another four years in April 2025, expanding its remit beyond facilities towards a place-based approach which also captures physical activity taking place in communities.
HCM: Moving Communities gets more funding and a broader brief
A month later, HCM reported that Moving Communities had adopted the WELLBY – Wellbeing-adjusted Life Year – methodology, enabling it to put an estimated monetary value on improvements in individual wellbeing as well as calculating wider health and societal benefits.
Read HCM’s coverage of the WELLBY development
What began as a mechanism for monitoring the recovery of public leisure from Covid is developing into a much broader attempt to build a national evidence base for the performance, reach and value of England’s public leisure infrastructure.
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