ABSTRACT
CIPFA (2009) figures showed the state of sports development in England and in Wales at the point of writing: estimated expenditures in 2008/9 were £172m and £13m respectively, and after income, net were £116m and £10m. These represented only £2.26 and £3.44 per citizen respectively, and subsidies (or depending on one’s perspective, public investments) of 69% and 79% respectively. Large urban areas, as one might expect, spent noticeably more than more rural authorities: London boroughs £2.36, metropolitan districts £2.98, unitary authorities £2.09, and non-metropolitan districts £1.78 per head.
These chapters have graphically demonstrated the range of jobs, organisations, settings and network of relationships in which SD is presently employed, a range that would have amazed the early SD officers in the Sports Council’s Action Sport projects of the early 1980s or even the National Demonstration Projects later in the decade. Hylton and Totten (2008: 91) called it initially almost ‘counter-cultural’. Now it is embedded in the daily work of LAs and NGBs. Whether this work amounts to a range as wide that Houlihan and White mused on in 2002 is something I comment on below. But it does justify a summary of the findings of Chapters 3 to 14 before moving to thematic analysis.
