ANDY FARR

Parkwood Leisure

Andy Farr, Parkwood Leisure’s new Strategic Director, is an industry veteran and one the leisure sector’s innovative leaders. Farr speaks to WellNation about his role and the sector’s future

Andy Farr has worked in the physical activity and leisure sector for nearly 25 years. During his career, he has held a number of roles across both the public and private sectors – including a near four-year stint at British Cycling, first as Head of Facility and Investment Strategy and then Head of Business Planning and Transformation. In September 2022, Farr was appointed Strategic Director of Parkwood Leisure, a specialist in the development and operation of leisure facilities which manages 90 sites – most of them on behalf of 30 local authorities – across England and Wales. In his new role, Farr will help develop and shape the future direction of the business. In particular, he will focus on Parkwood’s place-based community wellbeing work, working closely with specialist local partners and wider Parkwood Group companies across health, outdoor and indoor leisure and cultural services.

You’ve spent your career in the physical activity and leisure sector and this is your second stint at Parkwood? It is indeed. About a year into my first tenure at Parkwood (in 2018) an opportunity came up with British Cycling to support the Places to Ride programme. In a prior consulting role, I worked on the funding bid to DCMS for the Places to Ride fund as part of the Road World Championships legacy, so this was a unique scenario.

What does your current role at Parkwood involve? I lead and support the business development, marketing and healthy communities teams, within the overall remit of delivering positive impact at a local level and bringing our corporate mission to life ‘to encourage happier and healthier lifestyles’.

As someone who has seen the industry evolve, how would you describe the current state of the sector? The outlook for the sector is both really positive, because of the potential, but it is also held back by a confusion of message. There is also short-term decision-making and perhaps a lack of confidence to be clear where we can have the most positive impact.

There are massive opportunities around physical activity and the role it can play in communities across the country. That, at the heart of it, should be the focus of what we talk about – we deliver and encourage increases in physical activity to support better health outcomes, reduce health inequalities, enable better educational outcomes for children and young people and support community cohesion and cultural integration. The potential is brilliant, but I’m not sure we as a sector have got our messaging clear enough and developed the workforce effectively to grasp that opportunity. If we put the workforce in place combined with a long-term plan and clarity of message, the opportunity is significant.

We need recognition and honesty that we are talking about prevention and, by its nature, prevention takes a long time to generate a return and positive impact.

We then need to collaboratively upskill the workforce, recognising that we need to look beyond traditional industry qualifications and ask: what do our partners from a health, education and local community perspective want to see? What are the transferable skills and knowledge that we can upskill our teams with, to maximise community engagement and therefore the role of physical activity? Qualifi cations and training have historically been developed without necessarily having the stamp of approval from our health or education colleagues - for me collaboration is key to that workforce development, particularly around the health intervention and health outcomes and educational interventions we are delivering and seeking to scale.

The MSK Hubs program that Parkwood, ukactive, Good Boost and other operators have all been involved with is a great example of this. Essentially, it’s a government-funded ‘proof of concept’ project, that includes workforce development and programme delivery, which can become self-sustaining moving forward and therefore have an impact at scale.

What would you describe as the physical activity sector’s biggest strengths and opportunities? The passion, commitment, innovation and collaboration are the real strengths of our sector. Having just been at Elevate it was really heartening to see how many people were willing to share best practice and advocate for collaboration - knowing collectively we can deliver positive change for the sector is a strength of our industry. Long-term planning, workforce development and clarity of messaging are the big opportunities in my view, which must be addressed on a partnership basis not just within a public leisure silo.

And what about threats and weaknesses? Short termism is a critical weakness in the industry, which is often driven by short term targets, funding and strategies, and prevents genuine partnership development. There is also work to do in increasing diversity to ensure we can truly work within the communities we want to serve across the country. Ageing assets and challenging costs, especially around energy and staffing, are ongoing daily pressures.

we are really lucky to have very passionate people who are in their roles because they want to make a positive difference

The industry does not project sufficient clarity of the role and position that public leisure can play in community cohesion, education attainment and health and wellbeing.

We have a system that creates an emphasis and focus on short term targets and remedial actions (treatment rather than prevention) which is difficult to reconcile with prevention being a long-term intervention.

Has the public’s attitude towards physical activity and fi tness changed due to the pandemic? Yes, however, I think it has changed both positively and negatively, in the sense that it has exaggerated differences and magnified challenges between different communities.

People that had the opportunity and motivation to take part in physical activity have recognised the importance and role of fi tness and doubled down, continuing to be active or more active. For those whose access to physical activity is diffi cult, these challenges have been magnifi ed, making it harder for people to access opportunities and even more diffi cult to be physically active.

The public’s attitude has changed, but our industry has not yet fully recognised how this has changed the challenges and barriers to participation we need to address.

Does the government “get it”, in terms of recognising the physical activity industry’s potential role in improving the nation’s health and making the UK more productive? I do think the government gets it at a philosophical level and all the parties understand that physical activity can play an important role in a number of key agendas across community cohesion, mental and physical wellbeing and educational attainment. At a practical level that’s where it falls down.

Parkwood Leisure Parkwood manages 90 venues. Of these, 65 are public leisure facilities operated for 30 local authorities. There are another 25 venues across golf, theatres, outdoors, visitor venues and corporate fi tness facilities.

In my opinion, the government struggles to create cross-cutting plans that require system partnerships to implement, and it struggles to get the balance between treatment and prevention right. For example, in a short termist world of spending 99% of health investment on treatment and 1% on prevention, (an exaggeration but perhaps only slightly), it’s very difficult to change that balance without requiring more funding in the short-term so that treatment does not suffer. Practically, it’s therefore a really difficult challenge for government to tackle. It goes back to having a long-term cross-cutting plan that sees step changes over a period of time.

What is your message to the incoming government Please can we have a long-term plan, clear metrics across different departments and financial incentives, that has both cross party support and cross government departmental support. A strategy that genuinely has sign up from Department of Health, Department for Education etc to implement a long-term strategy, creating a better balance between treatment and prevention.

I would also ask that where funding is invested, it is directed towards scalable and sustainable initiatives, with a proof-of-concept approach that recognises value for money is important. Unless we prove the concept and then scale it, we will continue to have hundreds of projects that are reliant on grant funding, and when funding is taken away the project stops. To make a long-term difference in challenging financial circumstances, we need to create self-sustaining and scalable opportunities.

What makes Parkwood stand out from other management companies, what’s your USP? For me it’s the people, the heritage and the clarity of vision for the future. From a people perspective, we are really lucky to have very passionate people who are in their roles because they want to make a positive difference. This mindset helps us to support and facilitate the team, it’s hugely positive and beneficial.

From a heritage standpoint, we are a family-owned business and that brings with it a different approach to organisations that are part of larger groups. We are able to be clear on our purpose and our market (we only deliver within leisure and culture) so we have a real clarity of what we are trying to achieve, and how that influences decision-making.

In terms of the vision going forward, we are very clear on the purpose of public leisure in its wider sense and the role of Parkwood within that, and where we can deliver to encourage happy and healthier lifestyles in the communities that we work. That’s across both our own direct delivery and also our role in facilitating other partners to maximise those opportunities for community engagement, volunteer and workforce development.

A big focus for us over the next 18 months to 2 years is growing our Healthy Communities offer

There’s been some talk since the pandemic about “insourcing” – local authorities wanting to bring facility management back in house. Have you seen evidence of this? Yes, we have seen some moves in this direction. At present I’m not however seeing the evidence that supports this being a good long-term decision. I also think it’s a shame that we are seeing decisions being made wholesale on in-house vs outsourcing rather than making more nuanced decisions based on who is best placed to deliver the different elements of the services and interventions in the communities being served.

A good example is in Manchester, they have a facility operator who manages the network of leisure centres but they also have Manchester Active, a community-based trust that delivers a lot of their community intervention, outreach work, and physical activity development work in the city. In essence, they have looked at who is best placed to do each of the roles and this does not have to be the same vehicle or partner. They have a facilities management organisation that are national experts in delivering very efficient and effective facility management services and then you have a local community-based organisation working in the communities. It feels like a logical way of delivering against a strategy that requires multiple areas of expertise.

What are Parkwood’s future plans? Any plans to grow the portfolio of managed sites? Yes, we are definitely looking to continue growing and we continue to look for opportunities across the leisure and culture sector to grow the number of venues and services we provide. We operate across England and Wales and have regional and national structures to support our growth in the medium term.

A big focus for us over the next 18 months to 2 years is growing our Healthy Communities offer. We have a new brand “My Healthy Way”, which will be the umbrella brand for all of our Healthy Communities work, so we can scale and develop across our contracts. To support that we have brought Parkwood Healthcare, who were a sister company, into the leisure division to make sure that we have the clinical expertise to grow the Healthy Communities offering.