We want it all and we’ll keep working for it

Today we’ve published our Active Lives Adults Survey Report, which looks at the results from November 2023 to November 2024, so let's dig beneath the surface to understand a little more about what the data is telling us and why that matters.

As a reminder, activity levels are up and inactivity levels are down since we started the survey in 2015.

In fact, levels of activity in England are at their highest since the survey began – with 2.4m more people active since 2015.

That growth is coming from a number of different places, with really big gains coming from fitness activities like yoga and pilates.

More people have also been visiting leisure centres and gyms in the last couple of years, and more and older people are getting and staying active, suggesting some fundamental changes in how people are choosing to engage in physical activity.

There’s also really positive news for sports like football, netball, cricket and swimming, with increases across the board since the pandemic, meaning that team sports have recovered from the huge and lasting impact of lockdowns and restrictions.

At Sport England we’ve been working closely with partners across all these sports to help support new and different ways to reach people and break down barriers to participation.

A great example of this is the revolution seen in women’s football, which continues its long-term growth.

It’s also really satisfying to see levels of enjoyment of sport rising faster for those that have typically enjoyed it the least – evidence, we think, that our collective work to make sport more open, welcoming and accessible to everyone is starting to show its impact.

Of course, the picture isn’t perfect – there are still too many people who don’t feel like sport is for them, especially those people who share two or more characteristics of inequality.

We make no apologies for disproportionately targeting our work and our investment to better support those groups to get active.

But I also wanted to share why this is so important.

We know that current activity levels save the NHS £10bn a year, add £87bn to the economy every year and increase people’s wellbeing in a way that’s valued at £107bn annually. You can find all these stats on our website.

What that means is that if we can close the gap between those that are active and those that aren’t, we can further reduce costs to government, boost the economy and improve wellbeing even more than we do right now.

Lastly, I want to say thanks to the thousands of organisations and millions of individuals that have joined us in our vision to make sport and physical activity accessible to everyone – we haven’t finished the job, but the story so far looks like a positive one.