The operational efficiency of English public sport facilities

Based on the database of Sport England's National Benchmarking Service, this paper analyses the operational efficiency of 105 sports halls and swimming pools in England by adopting a mathematical programming technique – Data Envelopment Analysis. Incorporating an insight into the whole industry's performance as well as facilitating a shift from data benchmarking to process benchmarking, analyses at both aggregate and individual levels are presented. At the aggregate level, inefficiency is mainly identified as the inability to use resources in the technically most efficient way. Management type has a significant effect on operational efficiency, where non in-house facilities outperform in-house facilities and the differences in production structure are evident. At the individual level, an illustrative report for an individual facility is presented to demonstrate the assessment of facility performance, the setting of performance targets and the identification of benchmarking partners. Finally, implications and limitations of this research are discussed.