by Baseball Softball UK, www.baseballsoftballuk.com
Following discussions with Sport England, BaseballSoftballUK has been able to reaffirm its ability to deliver baseball and softball’s development strategy despite government budget cuts announced in the Comprehensive Spending Review on October 20.
While some of the capital funding promised by Sport England for facility development will probably be lost, there will be no cuts to Whole Sport Plan funding for the 46 sports that receive it between now and April 2013.
However, the importance of BSUK hitting its main Whole Sport Plan targets — including increasing the number of adults playing the sports regularly by 7,000, the number of young people by 1,500 and improving satisfaction from the sporting experience by 5% — has been emphasised by Sport England.
A summary copy of the current Whole Sport Plan can be found here.
Revenue Funding Secured
In a phone conversation on October 20, Sport England informed BSUK that the only cuts that will be passed on to baseball and softball will be to the capital investment promised for facility development in 2011-13. Sport England, which will see an overall 33% reduction in its grant-in-aid revenue from the DCMS by 2014-15, has made a commitment to protect and prioritise the front line of community sport and has preserved its existing financial investment in 46 sports.
In light of this, BSUK is able to confirm that there will be no reduction in the level of development activity and no staff redundancies at the organisation as a result of the government announcement. BSUK welcomes Sport England’s approach and its commitment to the delivery of our Whole Sport Plan.
Difficult Choices
BSUK Joint CEO and Head of Development John Boyd said: “Although the cut in capital funding is disappointing, BSUK remains able and committed to delivering our development strategy through Sport England’s commitment to protect the majority of our funding, and we will continue to work positively with Sport England to increase the number of people participating in our sports.
“The government’s commitment to reducing public spending was always going to lead to difficult choices,” Boyd continued, “and there remain challenges ahead. The cuts implemented within school sports will make it more difficult to organise sports activities for young people in school and further education and we have already started to review our approaches in these areas. Higher Education resources will also become stretched and this might have a negative impact on our university programming.
“However, we expect our New Adult League programme, Club Membership services and our player and coach development activity to remain mostly unaffected.”
Capital Cuts
Sport England faces a reduction of around 40% in its capital grant budget and has indicated that this may be applied to the capital funding promised in principle for 2011-13.
“But we are working closely with Sport England,” John Boyd said, “to try to ensure that alternative funding opportunities are available, while planning for such a cut to take effect from April 2011.”