It must be one of these things that comes with age. As you get older and more irascible, you start to hear yourself mumbling under your breath phrases that previously you had only ever read in Richard Littlejohn columns or voiced on one of the nastier phone-in radio stations.

So it was earlier this week, when to my horror I heard myself mutter "You couldn’t make it up" on reading that the proud Olympic borough of Tower Hamlets is spending public money in funding a series of special cycling classes specifically for women who wear the burka. And no, I wasn’t reading the Daily Mail.

My flabber was even more ghasted when I then read of another Borough close to the Olympic Park, Brent, which had actually set up an online virtual tour of the Council’s leisure facilities, presumably so that anyone feeling lukewarm about getting fit need never actually leave the comfort of their own living room.

Then there is the suggestion, apparently serious, from the head of one Government-funded sports agency, that to get more women taking part, every local council swimming pool should be compelled to install hair straighteners in the ladies’ changing rooms. 

Here we are, two years out from the London Olympics, and such has been the progress of John Armitt’s team at the Olympic Delivery Authority (ODA), the talk in British sport is less about budgets and delivery, it is already all about legacy, of seizing the Olympic initiative to turn Britain into a fit and active society for the rest of the century.

This is all fine and wonderful. The social and health benefits of more sporting participants are well versed: less obesity, less heart disease, less diabetes, and shorter queues for treatment at the NHS. Everyone’s a winner.

Sport England has set itself the goal of more than one million people taking part in regular sporting activity, inspired by the London Games, by 2013. And they are spending nearly £1 billion to do so.

Yes, a Government agency, heading into the teeth of probably the most drastic set of public funding cut-backs in a generation, is looking to spend £880 on every new sporting recruit that they land.

It is a little over a year since Sport England first announced that they would be investing £480 million in 46 national governing bodies, with 14 Olympic and Paralympic sports, including handball, taekwondo and wheelchair basketball, being funded for the first time to develop grassroots potential.

At the time of the announcement, Sport England’s new chief executive, Jennie Price, said: "Sport England has worked hard to ensure that our half a billion pound investment in grassroots sport delivers value for money and, most importantly, results." Them’s our italics.

Sport England states that "in delivering a lasting grassroots participation legacy, this country will be achieving something that no other host nation has succeeded in delivering". Too bloody right, for that amount of our money.

Let’s face it, given £880 million to get one million regular, new sporting participants, all we really have to do is stand on a street corner in the major cities, doling out one-year memberships of local fitness clubs. In fact, with those sort of numbers, we should be able to negotiate a bulk discount and save everyone some money. Job done.

But that certainly would not constitute Price’s "value for money", and nor would it produce a lasting sporting legacy. But the fear is that, effectively, is all that Sport England is doing.

What is deeply suspicious is the self-justifying manner in which Sport England is going about patting itself on the back for a job well-done. No one will ever really know whether an extra 10 million, or 10,000, people are taking up sport.

Why? Because the methodology is flawed.

Remember the scandal of the national immigration figures, when it was discovered that no one was actually bothering to do a headcount of people entering and leaving the country?

So it is with the Sport England participation project: no one is counting how many people are using sports facilities each week. Every local council, after all, runs a public pool or leisure centre. Each has to count the number of users it has, for every hour of every day of every week. Yet this information is not being used by Sport England.

Instead, the only measure of participation is through an annual online survey, which is sent largely to people already on the Sport England database (therefore self-selecting), and relies entirely on the veracity of the responses.

Thus, when the six-month update report was issued before Christmas, we were informed that canoeing had seen an uplift because of "a larger number of people taking domestic canoeing or kayaking holidays this summer".

"Appears"? Is this all guesswork? And are we to understand that a few holidaymakers going for a paddle during the summer is being included to bump up the participation figures?

"How many times each week do you take part in active sport?" was the gist of one of the survey's questions. Hmmm. It’s data of sorts, but virtually worthless.

Of course, Sport England’s number crunchers have certain problems in measuring participation. For instance, despite three decades of chivvying by Government quangos, the biggest Olympic sport, athletics, still does not have a mandatory national membership scheme.



Thus, Niels de Vos and his large staff at UK Athletics in Birmingham has no real idea whatsoever about the number of regular Joe and Joanne Joggers out there, running local road races or cross-country events each week.

The fact that UKA now distances itself from the athletics clubs, to concentrate almost entirely on the management of less than 200 elite, Lottery-funded athletes, does not help.

Had Sport England ever bothered to go to the sports clubs, and to the people on the ground who are dealing with membership, trying to fund the water rates, organising officials and coaches, booking venue hire and providing the teas, week-in, week-out, they might actually get a true picture of grassroots sport in this country.

Most clubs, in whatever sport, cannot ever find enough volunteers to referee all their matches, or coach all their kids, let alone fund the activities that might be required to help with any increase in participation.

Every scheme funded by Sport England through the 46 sporting governing bodies will, for argument’s sake, eat up enough cash to pay for around half-a-dozen administrators, at various professional levels. Yet just one of those salaries could be enough to provide a funding injection for one club for the next decade. And even when that funding runs out, the club would carry on functioning within its community, thanks to the goodwill of its members and volunteers.

After all, if you want to boost grassroots sport, why not directly fund grassroots sport: the sports clubs and schools?

In the last few weeks, I attended a couple of sporting events which have involved around 2,000 people at each. Neither received directly any public money, yet both were typical of the sort of events staged the length and breadth of the country every week, thanks to an army of sporting volunteers who receive precious little support from the outside their own communities.

The first event was a schools rugby match. Or rather, matches. Throughout the Saturday, two local schools, one private, one state – let’s say Cipriani’s old school against Sackey’s old school - staged no fewer than 26 games of 15-a-side rugby through every year group – that, of itself, represents nearly 800 lads involved in competitive sport on that one day alone.

All the matches were staffed by at least two teachers, while the host PTA laid on teas and refreshments.  By the time of the first XV clash in the afternoon, the attendance at the school playing fields was more than 2,000. The day’s sport wasn’t bad, either.

The following week, I watched a local 10-mile road race, an event founded during the first "running boom" in the mid-1980s. In the past 25 years, the organisers, the local running club, have managed to find sponsors to meet the bills and volunteers to man the water stations, and they now attract more than 2,000 runners, including a good proportion of women, to an exceptionally well-managed sporting event. This event has never received any direct funding help, yet every race entrant is "taxed" with a levy that goes to the governing body.

One running scheme that is receiving Sport England funding is something calling itself the Women’s Running Network.

Those familiar with the Sisters Network run by Alison Turnbull at what was then Running Magazine will know that that was operating from 1984. Simply, it was an out-and-out support network, pairing off experienced runners with newcomers, and it was widely adopted by many of the new running clubs with great success. Then, it was entirely self-funded.

Part of the Sisters Network’s appeal to newcomers was that it was informal and friendly, and not part of the forbidding bureaucracy of sport, which many newcomers find intimidating and off-putting, even at club level.

So what route does Sport England go down to boost participation in women’s athletics? Through a scheme run by the governing body, of course...

There are other sports participation schemes, sound in inspiration and construction, which are already making an impact. Yet a lack of "joined-up" Government – the sort of strategic overview which bodies such as Sport England ought to be taking – can see these initiatives easily break down.

The lack of swimming facilities in London has already been linked to the likely absence of any swimmers from capital’s swimming clubs at the 2012 Games. Anyone from inner London Borough Lambeth has virtually no chance.

Lambeth last year took advantage of a Government-funded scheme to offer free swimming sessions to the under-16s and over-60s. A real healthy initiative, it is also measured at the entrance to the council’s three indoor leisure centres (take note, Sport England). In the first six months of the scheme, there were 23,000 free swims.

From next month, there will be no free swims in Lambeth. All three of the Borough’s indoor pools will be closed at the same time – Brixton for the latest round of repairs, and the Victorian-built baths at Streatham and Clapham prior to demolition, one to make way for a supermarket. You couldn’t make it up, as Littlejohn might say.

More than 20 years ago, before the then athlete Sebastian Coe declared his political ambitions, he spoke to me about how sport in this country had been adversely affected by never being taken seriously politically. He talked about the absence of a sports lobby, something akin to the influential and powerful arts lobby that dominates the leader pages of our newspapers, the discussion sections of our TV schedules, and the seats of power in Whitehall.

The disparity is still evident today. While Tessa Jowell sits in cabinet as Olympics Minister, Britain alone among leading European sporting nations never to have offered a seat at the top table of Government to its Sports Minister. And when the Department of Culture, Media and Sport recently framed a policy-making initiative to increase grassroots participation across its entire brief, it outlined six areas of interest, only one of which is sport.

In July 2005, Coe, with his Olympic bid-winning speech in Singapore, finally gave voice to a sports lobby for Britain which might, just, finally reverse nearly a century of under-investment and neglect. Directing a good proportion of Sport England’s £880 million of precious investment towards the country’s beleaguered sports clubs and schools would represent a cost-effective way of making the nation fitter for the next 100 years.

Steven Downes is a sports journalist who has won awards for his writing and investigations, both in print and on television. The co-author, with Duncan Mackay, of the acclaimed athletics book Running Scared, Downes has also edited Athletics Weekly, been swimming correspondent of The Times and for five years was business editor at timesonline.co.uk