Further Information

The HPI tool is in the third phase of development. We would welcome your feedback.

Please remember to reference the project if you use the data or charts from this site.

Dibben, C, Watson, J., Smith, T., Cox, M., Manley, D., Perry, I., Rolfe, L., Barnes, H., Wilkinson, K., Linn, J., Liu, L., Sims, A., and Hill, A. (2008) The Health Poverty Index. The NHS Information Centre. Leeds, UK.

All Indicators > Indicator IH1: Recreational facilities

Definition Access to recreational facilities per capita
Dimension Intervening factors
Sector Healthy areas (intermediate)
Components
  • IH1_1 Access to recreational facilities per capita
Source Numerator 2001, 2001 Ethnic, 2003, 2005: Sport England Active Places Facility Finder, data as at March 2001 - http://www.activeplaces.com/
Source Denominator 2001, 2001 Ethnic, 2003, 2005: Mid year population estimate 2001, ONS

Additional details

The Sport England Active Places website features a sports facility finder tool which provides details of over 4,000 public access sporting facilities in England. The facilities of interest were indoor sports centres, athletic tracks, Astroturf pitches, swimming pools and tennis centres. Permission was given by Sport England to use the underlying data set. This included a postcode for each facility which could be linked to grid references and mapped.

GIS software was then used to create Voronoi polygons for each facility. These catchment areas allowed a measure of access to be created which was dependent on the size of the population each facility served. The resultant figure was aggregated to Local Authority District.

For ethnic estimation, an SOA level weighting function was created to model access for individuals in ethnic groups within Local Authorities.

This indicator has been frozen to the 2001 estimates until problems with estimates for 2003 and 2005 have been resolved.

Technology by OCSI