The push by public policy to address ‘participation poverty’ is driven by the potential of sport and leisure to improve health and reduce crime in local communities (Sporting Future, 2015); these social outcomes have traditionally provided the justification for subsidized service access and driven European public policy initiatives to focus on providing financial discounts to specific segments of society for greater inclusion and access to all (Vandermeerschena & Scheerdera, 2017). Though recent studies have sought to examine the extent to which public sector facilities are used by recreationally disadvantaged citizens, there remains a lack of knowledge about whether their exclusion is due to constraints such as service pricing (Liu, 2009) and if indeed price and inclusion are influenced by service ownership (Hallmann et al., 2012). This exploratory study addresses these knowledge voids in public policy implementation and contributes new empirical evidence on the impact of ownership, and more broadly service outsourcing, for policy delivery; which is of core priority to the public management discipline (Andrews et al., 2011).
Two research questions are addressed by this exploratory study in the context of public sector sport and leisure: Traditionally, some public services have been provided at a reduced cost for greater access opportunities among disadvantaged citizens, but is this the case under service externalization? And, if price of entry is no longer prioritized by different ownership types, does this impact the participation of disadvantaged citizens? While stakeholder theory states that effective management can be achieved when stakeholders are taken into account in a systematic fashion (Freeman, 1984), the resource-dependence model allows for the interpretation that this will likely vary depending on the external forces between ownership types, which will influence the pricing strategies adopted by different ownership types in the public sector. In turn, this is expected to impact the participation of the recreational disadvantaged between ownership types given the ‘structural constraints’ faced by disadvantaged citizens, i.e. financial problems, lack of resources, and accessibility issues (Alexandris et al., 2008). Secondary objective data is used to capture three different ownership types that coexist in service delivery in England (i.e., public, non-profit, private), their pricing of service access, and the level of inclusion achieved by each ownership type. Multivariate analysis of variance with a post hoc test is used to examine if significant differences exist between the three ownership types in levels of pricing adopted and the inclusion of recreationally disadvantaged citizens.
The findings demonstrate that policy-makers should not attach normative values to ownership types in the delivery of sport and leisure as contrary to common assumption private ownership is not damaging to the inclusion of recreationally disadvantaged citizens. Rather, private ownership reports the highest levels of inclusion across market segments despite public ownership having significantly lower prices than external ownership types. Future public policy research must now focus on establishing the needs of disadvantaged citizens for increased participation rather than assuming ownership and price matters; this is a flawed assumption that continues to drive public policy interventions across Europe (Vandermeerschena & Scheerdera, 2017).
