Community assets guidance

Taking control of your assets can help your club grow; develop new opportunities; secure their future and be more engaged with local people and organisations.

An interactive guide has been developed to help you understand your community rights. The guide is based on a written report authored by Dr. Adam Brown, Substance and Tom Hall, Sporting Assets. Access the individual sections of the guide by clicking on the buttons below or, alternatively, download the full guide by clicking here. 

Launch all modules here - Please note, you will first need to have registered and logged-in to access this toolkit.

1. Protecting your local sports facilities

Do you know of a local sports facility that you think is a valuable asset to your community? By listing sports facilities as Assets of Community Value you can help protect them from developers by giving the local community the right to bid for them. 

2. Your community right to bid

Do you know that you can get the opportunity to bid for your local sports asset - pitch, playing field or pool or hall - if it came up for sale or was being closed? By initiating a Right to Bid you can then buy time to put together a bid on behalf of the local community, this could be for a local pitch, pool, playing field or place. 

3. Transferring ownership of sports facilities

Community Asset Transfers are a means by which local authorities can transfer the management and operation of facilities to local community groups in the Voluntary and Community sector or statutory bodies. 

4. Other rights for sports clubs

The Localism Act and other legislation have provided some additional Community Rights that can be used by sports clubs or applied to help develop community sports. This section provides a short introduction to them. 

5. Community finance for community assets

How to fund your bid, asset transfer or build.No matter whether you are bidding to buy an asset, undertaking an asset transfer, building a facility or looking to take over a local sports service, you will need finance to do it. This section outlines some of the ways which you can raise different forms of finance as well as some of the preparations you will need to make in order to get that finance. 

6. How are you doing: Assessing the impact of your club

Whatever your club wishes to or does undertake, it is highly likely that it will need to report on the performance and impact you make. You should always be monitoring and evaluating what you are doing, to inform your own staff, board and members about how you are doing – and what you can do better. 

7. Help is at hand

The final section links to further support and includes a detailed glossary of the terms used throughout the guide. This will help you access the wide variety of support and guidance currently available on the topic of Community Assets.