Recommendation 44

HM Government · verbatim extract Accepted

We welcome the recognition of the role of volunteers and the intention of improving their experience across a number of areas. Sport and physical activity depends on a large workforce, currently 10.5 million volunteers, 2.6 million coaches, and c.600,000 people in paid roles. These people are deployed across 150,000 community sports clubs and beyond, in a sector where 78% of businesses are Small Medium Enterprises (SME’s). Within Sport England’s Uniting the Movement strategy, there is a focus on improving the volunteer experience as well as seeking to diversify the sport and physical activity workforce so it becomes more representative of the communities it serves, as well as meeting changing needs. We agree that the volunteering administration process should be streamlined to reduce the administrative burden on volunteers. For the last three years, Sport England has worked with the Chartered Institute for the Management of Sport and Physical Activity (CIMSPA) to understand the conditions by which the workforce in sport can be governed effectively, and the steps that would be required to develop a national workforce register. DCMS recently collaborated with Sport England and the Open Data Institute (ODI) around developing an open data standard for volunteering opportunities. We are continuing to work to explore how an open data standard may help improve volunteer administration, particularly in identifying ways to make it easier to volunteer and to streamline processes. This includes the development of a new national workforce register.