According to the government’s recent Community Life Survey, 7% of adults in England feel lonely “often or always”. That’s up from under 6% a decade ago, and the gap widens sharply by circumstance: 11% of adults in the most deprived areas report chronic loneliness, compared to just 4% in the least deprived. Disabled adults are more than four times as likely to feel lonely than non-disabled adults. These aren’t abstractions. They speak to a society where growing numbers of people go through their week without meaningful contact with others, and where the postcode you live in shapes how likely you are to be affected.
The Burnham government is turning its focus to place-based answers to problems like this. The devolution model rests on the idea that services designed and delivered locally will reach people that national programmes miss. Physical activity sits within that model. A five-a-side league in Wigan, a chair-based exercise class in a Bolton day centre, a parkrun in Salford: these put people in the same room regularly, and it’s that regularity, not the exercise itself, that protects against loneliness.
OpenActive is the open data standard that makes opportunities like these findable in the first place. More than 4,500 providers already publish upwards of 10 million local physical activity listings a month in a consistent, machine-readable format, from ocean swimming to orienteering. The standard is now being extended to cover the informal sessions that rarely make it onto a booking platform: the drop-in badminton at the local leisure centre, the walking group that meets by the noticeboard. Bringing that information into the same open feeds means a council, an app or an NHS system doesn’t need to already know an activity exists to help someone find it.
This is deliberately public infrastructure. OpenActive is funded by Sport England and DCMS, and stewarded by the Open Data Institute, which keeps the standard open to any developer or provider rather than owned by a single platform. That matters for place-based delivery: a free community session in a more deprived area gets exactly the same visibility as a paid class in an affluent postcode. No provider buys its way into an app’s search results; if you publish in the standard, then you will show up alongside everyone else.
The benefits run in more than one direction. Activity providers reach people who would never have found them through their own website or word of mouth, filling spare capacity and bringing footfall to the leisure centre café or the sports shop next door. Sport England’s Active Lives data put inactivity at 34% in the most deprived areas against 22% in the least deprived; making local sessions genuinely discoverable is one of the few levers that narrows that gap rather than just measuring it. The health return isn’t only physical, either. A weekly walking group gets a knee moving, but significantly also puts a dozen people in the same park, at the same time, week after week, until they know each other’s names. That repetition, not the exercise on its own, is what turns a session into a source of mental health and social benefit.
But none of this can scale by itself. OpenActive already has the infrastructure and the provider base; what it needs now is government willing to treat it as it treats transport or broadband data: formally recognised, backed, and embedded in NHS and local authority systems, so that every social prescriber and mayoral authority can rely on it as a matter of course.
It needs more activity providers, from national governing bodies down to the smallest community club, to publish their sessions into the standard. Every leisure centre, church hall and parkrun that lists what’s on offer makes the map of local activity in England a little more complete, and a little harder for someone nearby to miss.
