2024 – Our most impactful year to date 

With a new government, the wider public leisure and active wellbeing sector continues to face challenges as it seeks to redefine and position itself.  With limited resources, the need for innovative solutions to protect and enhance the role of public leisure and active wellbeing has never been more important.

SLC has been progressively influencing active wellbeing as it builds momentum as a movement for change.

The leisure and active wellbeing procurement market is well and truly recovered. SLC has supported some outstanding outcomes for local authorities through new contract procurements. These contracts will secure a sustainable future for local active wellbeing provision, enable £millions of cashable savings for the Councils and deliver enhanced social value to communities.

Procurement and Partnering

Our procurement and partnering work has seen us manage a significant number of procurements over the course of the year. Key highlights include:

Securing a groundbreaking partnership for Sheffield City Council building on our work to support their Sport and Leisure Strategy linked to £117 million investment. This is probably one of the country’s biggest and most complex leisure contracts and a real milestone in what will be a transformative programme of investment and service delivery for the City. Read more.

Establishing a partnership to secure Gloucester City Council’s leisure services after the dramatic collapse of their local leisure trust operator in 2023. SLC supported the Council in securing the service and protecting 90 local jobs in the immediate aftermath. The Council has now completed the procurement of an Operator for the next 15-years, with the support of the SLC team, and secured significant investment in the facilities in the process. Read more.

Following on from our strategic support working alongside North Herts Council we have enabled a long-term partnership and investment package for the Council delivering significant enhancements to the facilities, the service and the management fee payable to the Council. Read more.

Current Procurement Exercises

We are delighted to be supporting the following live procurement exercises:

Supporting the pivot to active wellbeing

We’ve continued to support the sector in embracing the concept of the pivot to active wellbeing and have sought to play a key role as a connector and collaborator with our clients who are leading the thinking in this area.

We have also been proud to be featured in a number of national publications including:

The Active Wellbeing Service – A movement for change – Read More.

The Sports Think Tank 2024 Manifesto – Read More.

Our own Duncan Wood-Allum took part in a video podcast on the future of public leisure with Andy Reed OBE, which has been extremely well received by the sector. Read More.

We featured in Health Club Management Magazine: Healthy partnerships: integrating physical activity. Read More.

Strategic Outcome Planning Guidance – Diagnostic support 

We have been supporting a number of local authorities in exploring their strategic provision using our sector leading approach to diagnostic support. This has provided senior leadership teams to get an independent review of their current position and a range of potential ways forward linked to their strategic priorities and asset management approach.

Delivering for our clients 

At the heart of all our work, is a focus on delivering great outcomes for our clients and providing a supportive and collaborative service. That’s why receiving positive feedback from the Local Authority’s we support means so much to us.

We are delighted that so many of our clients have provided some really lovely feedback. Read More.

SLC – team news

We’ve had two new colleagues join the team in 2024; Freddie Dean and James Mazarelo – Research Consultants.

Freddie joined SLC in March 2024 and has proven to be a very quick learner. We’ve been delighted with his progress and ‘can do’ attitude.

Freddie’s career highlight with SLC to date was taking Duncan out on the Lee Valley Velodrome causing a big crash! Both managed to get back on their bikes and carry on!

James joined SLC over the summer on a month-long paid internship following his graduation with a Sports Management Masters’ degree from Loughborough University. He made such an impact he was offered a part time position.

James combines his consulting career with being a member of the England and GB Men’s Hockey Team. A 2024 Olympian, James has recently returned from playing in the Pro League in Argentina.

Dom Hudson will be joining SLC in January as a principal consultant. Dom has previously worked in consulting for North Highland.

He volunteers on community sport and active wellbeing projects in London. Dom is also an endurance athlete and is getting married next year!

David Rushton Associate Director who has been with SLC for ten years, has now entered into a new phase of semi-retirement. Luckily for us he’s still supporting us on a number of projects in between playing Tennis and going on big dog walks with his beloved Gibson the Malamut.

We wish David well with his new work / life balance and are chuffed he will still be working with us.

Internal news

While our clients will always be our top priority, there have been many internal successes for SLC in 2024:

  • We remain first organisation in the sector to be awarded with B-Corp Certification. This measures a company’s entire social and environmental impact. B-Corp supports a theory of change where business is a force for good and plays a leading role in positively impacting and transforming the economy into a more inclusive, equitable, and regenerative system.
  • We continue to focus on quality, securing ISO 9001:2015 for the 9th year running. Our external assessment again raised no non-conformities which demonstrates the commitment of the SLC team to maintaining the highest quality systems and outputs for our clients. ISO 9001 is a certified quality management system for organisations in all business areas including facilities, people, training and services. It enables SLC to deliver an improved operational performance as we monitor, control, and improve the quality of our work, increasing our client satisfaction. Achieving this certification demonstrates our commitment to quality in our forms of working and the service we deliver to our clients.
  • We were sad to see Marcus Kingwell move on at the beginning of this year. We wish him all the very best with his career and we thank him for his contribution.
  • We’ve been investing in our learning and development through continuing our work with leading communications expert Margaret Webster to further enhance our reports and presentations to ensure clarity, brevity and impact.
  • We have implemented a nine-day fortnight to support staff’s wellbeing and work-life balance without compromising our service to clients.
  • We are measuring client satisfaction via the Net Promoter Score, widely accepted as the best measure of customer service and quality. So far, our Net Promoter Score is 10, the maximum possible.

In June, we celebrated our 15th Anniversary in style with an away day hosted at Lee Valley Regional Park. We’d like to thank Shaun Dawson and his team for their wonderful hospitality. 


Thank you

We would like to thank all our clients, associates, strategic partners and communities we have worked with this year for their support. We’re looking forward to a break and wish everyone a peaceful and happy Christmas and holiday period. See you all in 2025!