We’re delighted that our 2025 open letter to save the nation’s playing fields, led by our fantastic President Jill Scott MBE, has been highlighted in the Culture, Media and Sport Committee’s new “Game On” report.
The report calls for a cross‑Government strategy to bring together health, education, local government and community policy around a shared objective: increasing physical activity and widening participation in both community and school sport.
Chaired by Dame Caroline Dinenage MP, the Culture, Media and Sport Committee is appointed by the House of Commons to examine the expenditure, administration, and policy of the Department for Culture, Media and Sport and its associated public bodies. The aim of their recent inquiry was to determine how well community and school sport is meeting the needs of people across England.
We are pleased to see the Committee support calls to retain Sport England as a statutory consultee on planning decisions affecting playing fields. Playing fields are irreplaceable community assets and Sport England’s role provides a vital layer of scrutiny in the planning process to help ensure these spaces are safeguarded.
Proposed Government planning reforms are threatening to remove Sport England’s statutory consultee status. If this goes ahead, there will be no guaranteed protection for playing fields which would be detrimental to communities up and down the country.
In making the case for Sport England, the report spotlights our December 2025 open letter led by our President Jill Scott MBE and signed by 87 other leadings sports figures and organisations. The letter called on policymakers to retain key statutory consultee roles and ensure planning reforms retain a meaningful mechanism to protect playing fields and sports facilities for future generations.
The new report says: “We recommend that any future planning reforms include a robust and enforceable mechanism to protect playing fields and sports facilities, safeguarding these vital community assets for future generations.”
Our independent and unique legal protection model ensures that parks, playgrounds, playing fields and green spaces are safeguarded forever and we continue to seek explicit reference to the long-term legal protection of recreational open space within national planning policy.
In addition to playing fields, we believe strong layers of scrutiny should exist for all types of public recreational spaces and play spaces, regardless of designation or size. Current thresholds often exclude smaller but vital community spaces. But these tend to be the places where people learn to kick a ball, ride a bike or run – even modest green spaces deliver measurable health and wellbeing benefits.
We must ensure these spaces are legally protected for future generations to enjoy before it is too late.
The Committee calls for “no ball games” signs to be removed from public parks to promote children’s play. Play is vital for children’s development, physical health and mental wellbeing, yet our 2024 Green Space Index found that access to play is not equal, with 1 in 3 children in Britain living without a playground close to home.
The report’s play recommendations align with recommendations from the 2024 Raising the Healthiest Nation report, which noted that barriers such as “no ball games” signs “are harming the ability of children and young people to be in public space and feel welcome and part of the community.”
The Culture, Media and Sport Committee’s new report also recommends that PE be granted the same status as English, maths and science at school and that schoolchildren partake in two hours of high-quality PE lessons each week.
The Committee also notes that current investment in school and community sport is “insufficient and increasingly unstable”, and recommends the Government increases the 0.3% share of total Government expenditure on sport and recreation to at least 0.6% over the next decade.
“Investment in community sport and physical activity delivers substantial social and economic returns, including reduced illness, improved productivity, and support for people returning to work,” the Committee writes. “Underinvestment is felt most acutely in communities already experiencing significant inequalities.”
Overall, the report calls for a “decisive shift” to create “a coherent, cross‑government strategy” that addresses the Committee’s recommendations and “sets a clear, long‑term plan for building a more active nation through community and school‑based sport and physical activity.”
The new report’s concern that underinvestment in community sport deepens inequalities aligns with new findings from Sport England’s Active Lives Adults Survey. While the survey results show that physical activity in England is at a record high with 65% of adults being active, they also highlight that longstanding inequalities are still very much present.
Barriers to physical activity include where people live, gender, age, ethnicity, affluence, and disability and long-term health conditions.
According to the survey findings:
The data also shows that if a person is experiencing multiple barriers at once, their likelihood of being physically active becomes even lower.
We know that a person’s postcode can be a key barrier to their ability to be physical active. As development pressures ramp up, we must ensure that freely accessible spaces to exercise and be active, such as parks and playing fields, are not lost.
Our 2025 Green Space Index found that the more deprived an area is, the more likely it is to have lost a site, pitch, or parkland in recent years, either through closure or redevelopment. These sites are essential to community health, social cohesion and environmental resilience, so their loss only deepens inequality further.
Tackling this inequality must be prioritised in green infrastructure and planning policies moving forward.
At Fields in Trust, we firmly believe that everyone should have access to the benefits of physical activity regardless of their background or postcode. That’s why we legally protect parks, playgrounds, playing fields and green spaces across the UK in perpetuity, ensuring over 9 million people have a protected green space within a 10-minute walk from home. We hope to build on our 3,000 spaces currently protected and increase this number to 10 million people by 2030.