Generating an accurate picture of how leisure centres are used will be a big step towards redesigning a service that addresses rising health inequalities TABLE 1
National Statistics, Socio-economic Classification, Analytic Classes 1 Higher managerial, administrative and professional occupations 1.1 Large employers and higher managerial and administrative occupations 1.2 Higher professional occupations 2 Lower managerial, administrative and professional occupations 3 Intermediate occupations 4 Small employers and own account workers 5 Lower supervisory and technical occupations 6 Semi-routine occupations 7 Routine occupations 8 Never worked and long-term unemployed
much longer period of time, the leisure trust should explore ways of encouraging a move from pay-as-you-go to a prepaid monthly membership for this group, as it may improve retention. “A caveat for this must be that pricing strategies do not exclude those in who are in the lowest income brackets. Qualitative evidence indicates that navigating the competing pressures of providing services for the public good and remaining commercially viable make pricing decisions difficult and that pricing is only one barrier to accessing facilities. “We acknowledge the complexities of the interactions between concessionary pricing and commercial viability; however, where concessionary pricing schemes exist, they must be clearly defined and accurately tagged within the reporting systems to enable future examination of their effectiveness.” The usage data shown in this research reflects the same pattern shown in Graph 1 – namely
over-representation from the better off and under-representation from the least well off. It also highlights the challenges of collecting non-membership data from casual users and from concessionary charging schemes that do not differentiate between users. If this data collection problem is replicated in Moving Communities it will fail to show a full picture of the value and impact of the service we provide. Customer profiles and experience Moving Communities also utilises much of the data collection technology of the National Benchmarking Service (NBS). I’ve pointed out previously that although this service has highlighted a significant improvement in financial efficiency when it comes to the delivery of leisure services, we have seen a deterioration in access – particularly among people in socio-economic groups six and seven – those in semi-routine or routine occupations (see Table 1). ©Cybertrek 2021 Issue 5 2021
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