Cultural and leisure services provide vital social and economic support to residents
Culture and leisure services and organisations showed how adaptable, innovative and resilient they could be during the pandemic.
Their ability to respond rapidly to disruptive change will be important again as they work to support residents affected by the rising cost of living.
The physical and mental health benefits of these services save the NHS more than £314 million a year by preventing the need for costly health interventions; and their free or low-cost offer will make them a lifeline for communities who are feeling the squeeze on their budgets.
Their economic impact is also huge.
‘Unlocking the potential’, our recent partnership publication, found that the sport sector contributes £85.5 billion per year in economic and social benefits, as well as offering crucial employment opportunities to young people: 45 per cent of the 585,000 paid jobs in the sector go to young people aged between 16 and 24.
The creative industries have an equal impact by generating £111 billion to the UK economy each year and employing more than two million people.
Public sector provision of cultural and leisure services underpins this vital social and economic ecosystem, and we have a key, if often unacknowledged, role in keeping it going and ready to grow once these latest pressures have passed.
This will not be easy.
Our services are seeing energy bill increases of between 250 and 450 per cent, particularly for those running swimming pools, and we also face workforce and recruitment challenges as the rise in the National Living Wage is, rightly, implemented.
The LGA is in constant dialogue with the Department for Culture, Media and Sport and funding bodies about these challenges and how we respond to them.
Over the past year and a half, the LGA has commissioned two long-term pieces of work on the future of sport and cultural services.
‘Securing the future of public sport and leisure services’ sets out the changes that need to happen at national and local level to transform sports services so they are sustainable and deliver on multiple objectives such as health, climate change and levelling up.
Our current piece, the Commission on Culture and Local Government, has been exploring all these issues as it investigates the role of councils in underpinning our cultural infrastructure. Councils are the biggest public funder of culture in England, spending over £2.2 billion a year on culture and related services, and the commission is revealing the vital contribution this makes to communities and local economies.
Its call for evidence has resulted in more than 50 case studies from councils across the country highlighting the way in which culture, library and heritage services can:
- build civic pride in place
- promote better health and wellbeing, tackling loneliness, isolation and mental ill-health from the pandemic
- support local economic growth, including revitalising high streets and the wider visitor and night-time economies
- encourage social mobility, by providing routes into the rapidly growing creative industries
- offer vital access to safe, warm spaces for vulnerable people during times of crisis.
This online case study resource will be launched on 11 October, with the commission’s full recommendations launching in December.