Einleitung

When the UK government recently consulted on its new strategy for sport, it raised issues around the wider ‘value that individuals derive from playing sport’, as opposed to the previous strategy of focusing on the number of people who play sport each week. Over the past few years the wider benefits that sport can bring to society and how it can help people have started to become more widely noticed by Government. Two of the areas where sport might play an increasing role are in mental health and combating antisocial behaviour. Both of these areas are of interest to the Sport and Recreation Alliance, which, in partnership with the Professional Players Federation and Mind, published a Mental Health Charter for Sport and Recreation in March 2015 (more of which below) and has previously done research into sport for social good. However, the complexity of circumstance makes it difficult to determine whether policy and practice will deliver positive outcomes, especially at a time when financial resources are scarce (Parnell et al., 2015). For example, in relation to considerations in this paper, despite protestations of an increased focus on helping people with mental illnesses, and the ￡600 million investment announced in the recent Comprehensive Spending Review, there have been ￡23.7 million worth of cuts to mental health trusts since 2014. Moreover, it has been established that local authorities spend on average just 1% of their public health budgets on mental health services, while figures released by the Government show that the NHS only spends 6.6% of its budget on mental health. This is despite mental health making up 23% of the service’s overall burden of illness.