Turning sterling into gold

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David Hellier surveys the Lottery funded network of excellence now known as the English Institute of Sport

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It has taken six years of planning but the English Institute of Sport officially opened in May this year. Funded with £130m of Lottery money, the EIS isto provide the country’s elite athletes with the facilities and services they need to become medal winners at world sports events. It was the UK’s poor performance at the 1996 Atlanta Olympics that convinced sports administrators that more needed to be done for top athletes. The prime minister at the time, John Major, conceived the idea of a British Academy of Sport, to be based in Sheffield; but it was later decided to create devolved institutions for England, Wales, Northern Ireland and Scotland. And then the English Institute was in turn reconfigured as a network of regional centres, with facilities dotted all around the country.

Who got what from the ElS capitial programme

The strategic approach also shifted over time. Initially Lottery funding was targeted at helping individual athletes with living costs, medical facilities, physiotherapy and conditioning coaching. By October 1999, however, Sport England had decided to sink £120m (eventually bumped up to £130m) into a major upgrading of top-level training facilities under the banner of the new EIS.

Sport England employed a small team to oversee the development of EIS facilities. When they consulted the various sports governing bodies about their needs, they were presented with a wish list that added up to more than £400m of capital spend. The team then embarked on a round of prioritisation exercises with the governing bodies to whittle the shopping list down to a more acceptable figure, not least to avoid large amounts of wasted time and expenditure going into preparing bids that stood virtually no chance of success. Alan Skewis, head the EIS facilities team at Sport England, explains: ‘By 1999 we came up with a programme that identified the key facilities that we needed and the key partners that were going to work with us in providing them.’ Each host site applied directly to the Sport England Lottery Fund – but only after the EIS team had pre-screened each application, to check that it met all the Lottery criteria. Athletics won the biggest share, at £30m; hockey and swimming each won £13m; rowing got £10m. Skewis’ team has worked with around 35 partners. These include Bath, Loughborough, Leeds and Durham universities, all of which will operate EIS facilities; local authorities such as Manchester, which is hosting the Commonwealth Games; and sports clubs and trusts. And earlier this year Sport England set up the English Institute of Sport Company, which will employ staff to provide direct services to elite athletes.

A key aspect of the partnerships has been to make sure that university, local community and elite athletes all benefited from the facilities. At Loughborough’s swimming pool, for example, elite swimmers will get 27.5 hours a week of training time; the remaining six to eight hours a day will be split between community and university use.

Sport England says that the low proportion of partnership funding involved in many of the EIS facilities capital projects (averaging 20%) reflects the fact that partner organisations are taking on the operational costs and much of the financial risk going forward. In some instances Sport England’s capital contribution has been even greater, such as with the building of a bobsleigh track at Bath University, where there will be almost exclusive elite athlete use. Infrastructure funding with local authority partners such as Manchester or Gateshead has involved £18m of Lottery cash and £4m of local authority input. 

Elite sports programmes have tended to steer clear of private investment up to now, but EIS chairman Steve Cram says that in the longer-term ‘private funding is something that has to be looked at, especially if the Lottery funding is reducing’. To date Sport England has not rejected any EIS-related applications, largely thanks to the pre-application support work carried out by the EIS team. Alan Skewis acknowledges that they have trimmed their ambitions as Lottery income has begun to decline, but says that the focus in the next two to three years will be to complete the building projects to the right quality and on budget. ‘Then we will review how it all operates,’ he says.

According to Skewis, one of the greatest challenges has been to resolve the tension between meeting the immediate needs of athletes and building quality facilities that will serve their users well for the next 25 to 50 years. He says the approach has been to take the long-term view and that taking some time to get the facility right now will pay dividends in the future.

Another challenge has been to learn from the experience of centres abroad. The rowing team, for example, were so impressed by the facilities in Belgium that they have asked for the same things to be incorporated into new projects here.

In terms of lessons for others, Alan Skewis emphasises the importance of funding agencies having early and frank discussions with applicants about the parameters of the Lottery Act and accompanying financial directions. Among the pitfalls are the eligibility of the organisa-tion, demonstrable community benefit, financial viability, and rules relating to claw back of grant.

Wilma Shakespear, Australian-born national director of EIS, says the Australians mounted a similar long-term initiative after failing to win a single gold at the Montreal Olympics in 1976. It paid off: Australia is 20 years ahead of Britain in sports science and medical development, and won 16 golds at Sydney 2000.