Leisure centres and swimming pools are shutting across the country while prices for football pitches have soared as a result of huge cuts to local authority budgets • Owen Gibson: inspiring London 2012 message has become a millstone

Newcastle’s historic city swimming pool closed in August 2013 with eerie timing: it was precisely a year since the elite swimming competition at the London Olympics, whose backers promised that the entire country would benefit and a generation would be inspired to do more sport. In a public ceremony to mark the closure of the pool and Turkish baths, built in 1927 to promote better health and the enjoyment of swimming for Newcastle’s people, a local poet, Bill Herbert, wrote a song about “the farce of the Olympic legacy” to the tune of Blaydon Races.

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Nick Forbes, leader of the city council, has been blunt about the reason for such a recessive and bitterly resented decision: government cuts to the council’s budget of £151m since 2010, with another £90m projected over the next three years. “Over a six-year period the council will have had to cut its budget by 45%: nearly half of what the council does, gone,” Forbes explains. He is warning that cuts on this scale to his and other cities – the Local Government Association expects George Osborne’s budget on Wednesday to impose a further £3.3bn cut – is making it difficult for local authorities to fulfil their most basic legal responsibilities: looking after vulnerable children and pensioners. Parks, playing fields, swimming pools, leisure centres, the non-statutory, civic, health and quality of life provision which councils originally took over from a patchwork of philanthropic monuments, have been inescapably cut during the five years straddling the Olympics, for which £9.3bn of public money was found.

Newcastle’s council says it must drain a further £2m from its sport and leisure budget over the next three years and, having closed the pool and transferred two others and two leisure centres to trusts, it is looking to offload all its remaining leisure centres.

Nationally, the new sports minister, Tracey Crouch, reacted to the recent drop in numbers of people participating in sport once a week, down to 35.5% of adults, including the startling 729,000 fall in people swimming over the past decade, by directing blame on to the quango Sport England and the sports governing bodies whose programmes it funds.

A government spokesman told the Guardian: “We are investing over £1bn of public funding to strengthen community sport over five years. But the sports minister has been clear that too many sports bodies are currently not delivering in bringing new people from all backgrounds to their sport. This is why a new sports strategy is being worked on that will further build on the cross-government work on sport and physical activity that happens.”

However, that £1bn “public funding” for community sport melds money from the national lottery, of which sport is one of the direct, statutory beneficiaries, with funding Crouch’s government provides. Sport England says that its annual budget of £325m is comprised of £243m from the lottery – 75% – with a mere £82m coming from the government.

The LGA has calculated that from 2009-10 when the previous Labour government was investing in sport and leisure with £1.4bn being spent by local authorities, the budget this year has been reduced to around £1bn. That cut, £400m nationally per year, before the further cuts expected to be imposed this week, is almost five times more than the total money the government provides to Sport England.

The Chartered Institute of Public Finance and Accountancy has analysed the sport and leisure budgets without libraries and other cultural services – which have also suffered huge, well‑publicised cuts – and calculates the budget purely for sport has fallen £215m a year, from £832m in 2009-10 to £617m nationally this year, a cut of around 25%. A survey by the Chief Cultural & Leisure Officers Association has estimated that since the cuts began to bite, 6,000 sport and leisure staff have gone.

Mark Allman, the CLOA chair, is head of sport and active lifestyles in Leeds, which has closed two swimming pools and reduced opening times at all its sports centres. He describes the three years since 2012 as “a missed opportunity to build a proper plan into the Olympics” but, like many within local authorities, points to the efforts being made to maintain facilities and programmes.

Leeds has managed to build two new sports centres: the John Charles and Holt Park, the latter combined with health and social care facilities which many see as a model for the future. Allman says that bigger cities have had the capacity to consolidate their facilities – Manchester has closed five older leisure centres recently but built three new ones – while smaller district councils lack alternative options and are struggling nationwide to keep facilities open.

Lisa Mulherin, Leeds city council’s executive member for health, wellbeing and adults, bemoans a £6m cut in the sport and leisure budget compared with 2010-11, part of a £178m, 40%, overall cut from the council’s 2010-11 total budget of £446m.

“Nobody wants to close facilities; if we had the funding we would never have closed those pools and we would be investing more in sport and activity,” Mulherin says. “This government is saying it wants to encourage sport, particularly in deprived communities – but it is doing the polar opposite.”

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Birmingham city council has transferred several sports centres to trusts, while seeing significant increases in participation at those it retained by making entry free, due to a partnership with local health authorities. Paulette Hamilton, cabinet member for health and social care, hailed that as a “real success” – the kind of “joined-up thinking” Crouch has said she will try to engender, yet points to “savage cuts” – £462m from Birmingham’s budget since 2010-11 – which she blames for the overall national fall in participation. Her council has increased hiring fees for its football pitches by 91% since then, which Kenny Saunders, of the Save Grass Roots Football campaign, says is being replicated across the country and driving senior and junior clubs away.

In government responses from three departments: culture, media and sport, health, and communities and local government, there was not a single acknowledgement that the massive cuts to sporting provision during this time of promised Olympic legacy are having any impact at all. The DCMS said: “We work closely with local government to ensure they continue to provide the best services that local people want to see.”

The Department of Health, which many believe should take overall responsibility for community sport as part of a joined-up battle against modern sedentary lifestyles, says obesity now costs the NHS £5bn annually. Yet initiatives pointed to by the DH comprised £600m being spent by another department, education, on school sport and the health campaign Change4Life. That, too, has had its funding cut, by more than 50%, from £23.45m in 2009-10, to £10m this year.

The opening ceremony of the £9.3bn Olympics broadcast to the world modern Britain’s NHS and social advances, even while the legacy of sports facilities built over more than a century was being relentlessly undermined, under assault by a thousand cuts.