Evaluation of the Bristol Core Cities project - final report

The Sport England-funded Bristol Core Cities Project (BCCP) aimed to increase levels of physical activity in three deprived wards within Bristol (Lawrence Hill, Filwood and Hartcliffe and Withywood) by helping inactive people to engage with and take part in physical activity opportunities. The project ran for approximately two years, beginning January 2018 and was targeted at people who were classed as inactive i.e. physically active for less than 30 mins per week. The BCCP sought to establish evidence concerning the impact of activities which sought to help currently inactive people engage with and take part in physical activity opportunities with a view to informing the development of future similar projects. The University of Gloucestershire was commissioned in January 2018 to undertake a summative assessment of the project, conducted between March 2018 and May 2020. A total of 424 separate individuals engaged in the BCCP, the mean age being 51.3 years (SD=16.6 years) with females representing the majority (73.6%, n=306) across all projects. Overall, those indicating White ethnicity made up the majority of participants (86.1%, n = 360). A total of 246 (58%) of respondents indicated some form of medical or wider physical and mental health issue. Available data indicated a mean activity time of 543.1 minutes was completed for each project, the range being between 60 and 4,680 minutes. Greater organisational knowledge and awareness helped to develop links between the BCCP projects and also to create awareness of wider services. This developed and enhanced links and networks which in turn created opportunities to share information, data and knowledge. This helped established a stronger and better offer linked to local resources including leisure centres, sports clubs and national governing bodies (NGBs). Partnership working was perceived as an effective response to challenges posed in the wider political and economic contexts when organisations were able to create and maintain communication around shared interests and objectives. This benefitted organisations by providing a mechanism through which local responses could be devised in order to secure shared outcomes and to use specialist knowledge and skills within other organisations. The diversity of stakeholders and their associated projects was potentially problematic in that issues of cooperation, trust and time pressures might have served to limit the ability of projects to embed themselves within the fabric of communities. As a consequence, it was possible that there were issues in realising the BCCP’s synergistic potential which relied on the purposeful combining of knowledge, skills and resources of the projects. Findings suggested that every £1 invested in the BBCP returned between £2.17 and £3.14 to society in the form of psycho-social outcomes across the primary and secondary outcome domains, and most notably with respect to health, wellbeing, social isolation, community participation and the motivational attributes of its participants. Subject to the limitations of the study scope and related data collection issues, this represents an indicative minimum 200% return on investment for the commissioners of the BCCP.