Sport England works with local authorities and sport governing bodies to help ensure the right sports facilities are provided, in the right places, to meet the needs of local populations and encourage active lifestyles. Decision makers need to know exactly where formal sports currently take place, what facilities are available and where there are gaps in provision, to help them plan future investments in sports.

To address this challenge, Sport England had previously developed a website called Active Places Power, comprising tools for exploring Sport England’s extensive database of over 115,000 sports facilities. This bespoke platform was, however, built on out-dated technologies and not fully integrated with the organisation’s other GIS systems. Every time Sport England wanted to make changes to the solution, it had to engage specialist software engineers, which made it costly and time-consuming to enhance.

Recognising the urgent need for a new approach, Sport England began by building a foundational GIS platform to support its current and future geospatial applications. It was already using Esri’s ArcGIS desktop software and services within the organisation, so elected to create the robust, underlying geospatial data infrastructure that it needed using ArcGIS Enterprise, hosted in the cloud. At the same time, the organisation migrated its core database of sporting facilities (known as Active Places) to the new ArcGIS platform.

Next, Sport England reimagined Active Places Power, effectively building on top of the new GIS infrastructure. This cloud-based solution was created within ArcGIS Online and uses functionality from ArcGIS Hub Premium, ArcGIS Survey123, ArcGIS Experience Builder, ArcGIS Dashboards and Esri’s geoprocessing services to deliver a modern toolkit for users. “We use lots of different parts of the Esri technology stack, but they all talk to each other in a seamless way,” explains Liz Clarke, Head of GIS at Sport England.

The new-look Active Places Power is more intuitive to use and has more modern interfaces than its predecessor. Staff at Sport England, local authorities and sport governing bodies rely on it to inform their investment strategies and make sure they are providing the right facilities, in the right locations. The toolkit offers a wealth of capabilities, including spatial tools that estimate where populations can’t reach a sports facility and ‘demand calculators’ that enable users to estimate the additional demand for sports facilities that may arise from anticipated population growth in an area.

Sport England is now leveraging its new GIS infrastructure and single source of geospatial data to build more apps, maps and services for staff and stakeholders. For example, the organisation has recently launched a new ArcGIS solution, called the Small Area Estimates tool, that enables internal and external users to explore the results of Sport England’s ‘Active Lives’ surveys and estimate the proportions of adults, children and young people who are active or inactive/less active, by area.

Estimated cost savings of £1 million
The new, ArcGIS-based Active Places Power toolkit relives local authorities, sport governing bodies and other stakeholders of the need to capture and maintain data and develop their own analytical tools, creating savings across the sector. For example, Sport England estimates that having access to playing pitch information through Active Places Power saves local authorities over £1 million per annum in playing pitch strategy production costs.

Multi-million-pound investments in sports
The Active Places Power toolkit underpins the evidence to secure investment into the sports sector. Using Active Places, Sport England alone negotiated £14.4 million into sport through the planning system in 2023/24. Commenting on this achievement, Nick Evans, Director of Planning and Active Environments at Sport England, says, “We have been able to quickly replicate tools within ArcGIS, which are intuitive to use, enabling our Planning Team, and others, to make a robust case for developer contributions for new sports facilities to offset the increased demand generated from new development.”

30% reduction in application maintenance costs
Sport England has compared the cost of carrying out continuous improvement on the new-look Active Places Power, the new ArcGIS-based Active Places database and the underlying ArcGIS infrastructure with the cost of carrying out the same tasks previously. Through this exercise, it has estimated that the new solutions will reduce costs for the organisation by at least 30%.

15-fold increase in development speed
Sport England no longer needs to engage specialist software engineers to carry out bespoke programming every time it wants to upgrade Active Places Power. As a result, updates that used to take between two and three working weeks to implement can now typically be delivered in just one day using ArcGIS, which is up to fifteen times faster. Simple fixes, like changes to the way pop-up boxes display, can even be done in as little as an hour, empowering Sport England to implement application enhancements on demand.

Capability and flexibility to innovate
The new ArcGIS infrastructure has given Sport England the capability, flexibility and, indeed, enthusiasm to deliver additional, value-adding apps. The organisation is, for example, currently converting spreadsheets into interactive dashboards, using the ArcGIS Dashboards app, which will provide added transparency about how Sport England is investing £250 million a year. “We are right at the beginning of an exciting new journey!” Clarke exclaims. “ArcGIS gives us the ability to deliver more applications to support our colleagues and the sport sector as a whole.”