UK Sport will formally adopt a new policy from today (November 6th) on the eligibility of athletes and athlete support personnel to receive public funding, following consultation with members of the public, sports, athletes and key partners.
As the guardians of elite sports funding in the United Kingdom, UK Sport takes its responsibility to promote high standards of conduct among our Olympic and Paralympic athlete population very seriously.
As part of this responsibility, we committed to taking a closer look at the eligibility of individual athletes, as well as support personnel, to benefit from the public and National Lottery funds, based on their conduct, to include areas such as serious criminal convictions, match fixing and corruption, with doping, disrepute and false representations made to UK Sport.
A draft policy and procedure with supporting resources was put together and circulated for consultation in August and September, with a view to ascertaining that our position was in line with the expectations of the public, athletes, and administrators; and to provide an opportunity for all key parties to feed back any concerns or issues with the draft to help create a final version.
Overall the response to the consultation was positive with engagement from sports and key partners particularly.
Liz Nicholl, Chief Executive of UK Sport said: "We were extremely heartened by the consultation results, which showed real support for us to implement a comprehensive conduct policy, and that our draft policy stance was consistent with what our stakeholders and the public expected to see.
"While I hope that any future conduct considerations under this policy will continue to be few and far between, given the generally outstanding conduct of athletes and staff working on sports’ World Class Programmes, it is comforting to know that a robust position has been established which will continue to help us to maintain exceptionally high standards."
Read the policy in full
Read the procedure in full
Read a summary report of the consultation feedback