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Community Assets and Rights

Community Rights for Sport Guidance

With increasing pressure on local authority spending, community rights represent an opportunity for you to protect and take control of your local sports pitches, pavilions, sports halls and pools.

Taking control of sports assets can help your club grow, develop new opportunities, secure its future and be more engaged with other local people and organisations, thereby placing your club at the heart of your community.

Community Assets Guidance

Buddle has guidance designed to help you understand what you can do with community rights and how you can go about getting involved. It also highlights where you can get support and funding to help you with this.

The guide has been developed to:

  • Provide a simple step-by-step guide so sports organisations know how new legislation might enable them to protect, buy, or run local sports facilities
  • Outline the provisions in the Localism Act 2011 for community rights that sports clubs can use to protect, buy, or run local sports facilities
  • Signpost sports clubs to further advice from us and other agencies, as well as to funding and in-kind support that may help them develop proposals under the new rights.

Use Community Assets Guidance

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How do community rights work? 

By using community rights to list sports facilities as an Asset of Community Value, you can help protect them from being closed, mothballed or sold by giving the local community the right to bid for them.

By initiating a Right to Bid, you can then buy time to put together a bid on behalf of the local community.

You can also transfer sports assets to your club, or a community organisation, without going through these stages by agreeing a transfer with your local authority.

Is your local pitch or pavilion at risk of closure? Are you worried it might be mothballed or sold? Now you can do something about it. For more information, contact us by email.

VAT Guidance

Understanding your VAT responsibilities is important when you’re planning, are in the process of undertaking, or have recently completed a large capital project such as a Community Right to Bid. 

That’s why we’ve developed specific VAT guidance to help sports clubs navigate this complex area of tax. Click on the link below to access the VAT guidance via the Club Matters website. 

VAT Guidance

Community asset transfer case studies

Blackbridge Athletics Track
Blackbridge Athletics Track

Blackbridge Athletics Track was saved from a slow death through the efforts of a group of dedicated volunteers and a forward-thinking local authority.

Westway Development
Westway development trust

Find out how the lives of those who live and work in the vicinity of the Westway flyover has been enhanced thanks to long-term investment in urban regeneration.

Young girl doing hand stand gymnastics
Nottingham City Gymnastics Club

Find out how a growing club with no base got its own building through the asset transfer of an underused community centre.

Community Asset Transfer Toolkit

We’re in the process of creating an updated Community Asset Transfer Toolkit. In the meantime, for help and advice on the community asset transfer process, we recommend referring to the following resources:

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