Play Sufficiency Assessment

Our Vision

Our vision

Our vision is to create, improve and develop excellent, free and accessible family play provisions across the county, promoting active and healthy lifestyles.

Aims of the strategy:

• Develop a culture of families being active together.
• Provide safe and inclusive play spaces across the county, close to where people live.
• Secure long-term funding for consistent, sustainable and equitable play provision.
• Work with others to balance play spaces and play provision across the county, in relation to need.

Objectives of the strategy:

• Improve accessibility and inclusivity across all age, physical and mental capacities.
• Develop medium and long-term management and investment plans.
• Involve communities and young people in local play design.
• Protect and enhance play provision within the county’s planning framework.
• Utilise digital solutions for the planning, management and maintenance of play provision in the county.
• To offer community involvement, management and Community Asset Transfer (CAT) options.
• Identify and utilise school play space to provide a more balanced play offer to communities, alongside options such as after-school managed play/physical activity in council play areas.

Our focus

This strategy will focus on the equipped play areas provided and maintained by the council. These are reasonably well-distributed across the county. They are also structured to provide play for a range of children.

This strategy looks to:

• identify and add the concept of natural play space;
• broaden the capacity of greenspaces; and
• provide the opportunity for play without the need for equipment. (In some areas of the county, we could achieve this by working with other landowners)

Schools provide play space in an enclosed and secure environment. We need to explore the value this brings to many deprived children. This would show us what further opportunities we could make available.

As part of the distribution of play areas, we have considered and mapped:

• privately-managed play areas; and
• Publicly-accessible play areas on housing developments, provided as part of the planning process, or through a management company set up by the developer which would manage the play area and associated areas of POS (paid for via a management charge to house owners). We cannot guarantee the long-term retention of these, or the play value provided.

We have excluded private play areas. For example, pre-school, day-care and commercial soft play.