The core purpose of a County Sports Partnership (CSP), and the question that has often been asked since their created status over two decades ago, around the millennium, is to act as a crucial local mechanism for driving up participation in sport and physical activity across their geographical area.
Having been embedded in the landscape, and for a time, having worked myself closely with them, the answer became clearly evident: they serve as semi-autonomous organisations, hosted by entities like County Councils, Local Authorities, or even universities, but are primarily funded by Sport England (SE). The CSP Network, their membership body, coordinates this effort, and its headline goals are strategic and measurable.
The role of a CSP is not to directly run every club but to create partnerships and coordinate delivery of programmes within their area. This requires a focus especially on those people who are inactive. The remit is vast, covering counties and even metropolitan areas or aggregated unitary authorities. When the CSPs were established, they were tasked with supporting the NGBs (National Governing Bodies of sports) locally.
Their key goals for 2020 were illustrative of their ambition: to get 500,000 more adults regularly participating and to reduce the number of inactive adults by 250,000. Beyond that, they also aimed to get 1 million young people more active, demonstrating a whole-of-life approach.
This general purpose means that the CSP works with local organisations to ensure the programmes are supported and that the sports activities are newly created or enhanced to reach as many people as possible. The sheer number of individuals whose lives they aim to affect is why the funding from SE is so essential, enabling them to support the necessary partnerships and projects that help the local community get involved.
Organizational Evolution: The CSP Background
The original structure of CSPs was usually as hosted organisations; Benchmarking across the sector identifies that since their starting point, there have been very different directions of travel. For example, some CSPs have left their original host arrangements to become independent entities, constitutes about a third of the total number of CSPs now. These are often registered as a company limited by guarantees (CLG) and a charity.
This also represents a direction of travel for more CSPs. Others have become virtually embedded within the local authority or county council departments that first hosted them, existing as departments. I’ve personally seen CSPs that have developed a half way arrangement, retaining the advantages of being hosted and having a charitable or trading arm. Some have had both structures incorporated. The dynamism within these organisations has created a similar yet evolving network, with each CSP adapting for its local needs and governance preferences.
Evolving Role: CSPs and the Health Agenda
The CSPs’ purpose is changing due to the changing needs of the Country, shifting away from a very limited amount of focus on just sport participation towards a long term move to address the wider health of communities. At first sight, it’s difficult to think of a single agency better placed—in fact, best placed—to play a key role in this. The reasons for this lack of intent in the latter are threefold. Firstly, there’s a natural conservatism and reluctance in local authorities and the medical profession to fully engage with or recognize sport and physical activity programmes as remedies or preventatives, viewing them as rather than treatments; this is probably true of the public health sector, too.
The perception is that CSPs are about ‘sport’, not social change programmes. Secondly, the Government’s ambition to drive efficiency improvements and the resulting financial constraints on local authorities make it difficult to secure sources of funding or sources of income beyond Sport England. Thirdly, and most importantly, the CSP’s ability to deliver an effective difference in community health is hampered by a very limited amount of control over strategic health agenda funding, which is the immediate need.
However, my experience would suggest that CSPs are ideally placed to do much more to improve the health of communities and confront the epidemic of obesity, dementia, diabetes, well as other chronic diseases. This need is critical. Building on their local networks, they have the local insight and technical skills to design and deliver effective physical activity programmes for disadvantaged elements of society.
This requires a strategic shift. Sport England has responded by encouraging a long term move towards making the CSP a sustainable organisation, which includes a tactical review of hosting arrangements and encouraging incorporated status to allow them to broaden their sources of income. This is happening very slowly, due to financial constraints.
Finally, and ultimately, if the Government level has the ambition to see a combined and more effective commissioning happening this way, it will require a greater degree of engagement tool and a push to bring together these agencies. The lack of strategic commissioning is the largest reasons for their limited impact. This continuous move for continuous improvement is key, but the reluctance remains, demanding ‘drains-up’ reviews of operations and local initiatives to ensure sport for development is recognised when funded.
Driving Health and Activity Outcomes
The core purpose of CSPs is to drive up participation in sport and physical activity because, ultimately, this can make a crucial difference to health outcomes. As an individual who has worked in this sector, I’ve witnessed that the challenge is not just about sport for its own sake, but using it to help mitigate the rising epidemic of obesity, dementia, diabetes, and other chronic diseases.
Successfully tackling these serious diseases will require a complete mind-set change of approach among all agencies involved. With adequate support, CSPs are perfectly positioned to deliver these outcomes by embedding activity within the communities they serve.
Securing Strategic Health Improvement Funding
It requires strategic health improvement funding to truly enable CSPs to support physical activity programmes that will materially affect the severe health issues mentioned. Simply put, it cannot reasonably be expected that Sport England, local authorities, and voluntary organisations alone can provide CSPs with all the funds needed.
I’ve personally observed that the current funding model is insufficient to deliver the scale of programmes necessary to tackle these systemic issues. To make a lasting impact, this essential physical activity work requires dedicated, large-scale health improvement funding—the kind that moves beyond traditional Sport budgets to recognize CSPs as key health assets.
Collaborative Challenges and the Funding Imperative
In the last few years, Public Health has undergone major changes with the objective of delivering a coordinated approach to health issues across counties. The responsibility for determining what health support is required was passed to CCGs (Clinical Commissioning Groups). Since this shift, CSPs have worked hard to engage with CCGs and Public Health bodies locally to provide health programmes that CCGs and Public Health require.
However, the outcomes have, at best, been mixed, which means we must understand how each organisation can contribute to delivering desired outcomes. If CSPs, Public Health, and CCGs are to work more closely together and effectively affect the wider health issues described, several organisational, funding, mind-set, and cultural issues need to be overcome. My experience suggests that this imperative to work together has to come from the Government departments that control funding.
Ultimately, delivering better public health across the country is paramount. The current situation resulted in a disconnect, but a coordinated approach is the objective. For the agencies to work together and understand their collective role, the push for shared outcomes must originate from central Government. The current funding models place a huge responsibility on CSPs to provide programmes yet tie their hands when it comes to the large-scale strategic support required to overcome cultural and mind-set issues that prevent seamless collaboration. We can see that the major changes in CSPs‘ operating environment require this work to come with explicit backing from the highest Government level so that each can truly contribute and deliver on the joint objective of improving health.
The Paradox of CSPs: Strength, Weakness, and Irony
The core situational weakness for CSPs in the trio of collaborating organisations is that they do not have a formal strategic purpose and role for the delivery of physical activity remedies aimed at community health improvements. I’ve found this lack of a mandated role incredibly frustrating because the irony is that the CSPs, more than most, do have the insights, skills, local relationships, and ability to do so.
They are often the organisations on the ground, yet they not officially have the strategic purpose to delivery what they are most capable of—which is creating meaningful health improvements through physical activity.
A Catalyst for Recognized Health Improvement
The recently published Public Health England document—‘Everybody Active, Everyday’—needs to be used as the catalyst to bring together various agencies and determine how each can contribute to bringing about the health improvement sought.
For this vital shift to happen, the purpose of CSPs to increase participation in sport and physical activity for clear health improvement reasons needs to be formally recognised across government departments. As someone who has watched these documents appear and disappear, I believe this one is key. If this recognition becomes a reality, it will truly embed CSPs‘ contribution and finally give them the power they need to deliver the improvement the nation is sought.