Sport England's Chair, Richard Lewis, today encouraged local authorities and other facility providers to take advantage of Quest and our National Benchmarking Service for Sports Centres (NBS), which are under new management.

Each service plays a key role in helping facility operators and managers to ensure they are working efficiently as well as delivering the highest quality services. Sport England has announced that Right Directions, in partnership with Leisure Net Solutions, have been appointed to manage Quest and NBS.

Richard Lewis, Sport England's Chair, said: "It's great news that the management of Quest and the National Benchmarking Service is in the expert hands of Right Directions. At a time of increasing pressure on finances in every sector, it's vital that we do everything we can to help our partners to secure value for money for their investment in sport - and to ensure that sports facilities are constantly improving. I would really encourage everyone in the sector to look at how they could benefit from these services."

Quest is a tool for continuous improvement, aimed primarily at the management of sports facilities. It defines industry standards and good practice. NBS provides local authorities with a rigorous, robust and independent assessment on the performance of their sport and leisure centres compared with equivalent facilities across the country.

Martyn Allison, Chair of the Quest Board, said: "In the present financial climate, councils will need to be sure they are giving the best quality service possible to their communities, getting maximum efficiency and delivering value for money from their leisure facilities and services. Quest and the National Benchmarking Service can give them that assurance, so I am pleased that, after a difficult time, we can confirm we are back in action. We recognise we have some ground to recover before we have the full confidence of the sector but the new contractor, the Quest Board and Sport England are determined to provide you with a product to be proud of."

Among those operators that have benefited from Quest are GLL, who manage over 70 leisure centres. GLL Procurement and Audit Manager Mike Lockwood said:

"The Quest process (81% recently achieved) forms a major part of the quality and operational systems within Britannia Leisure Centre in Hackney. The process gets excellent buy-in from both management and front-line staff to achieve our overall objective to deliver quality services to the community and at the same time meeting our targets as a Social Enterprise."

Caroline Constantine, Director at Right Directions, said: "We're delighted to have been awarded the Quest contract and are looking forward to launching some new and improved Quest and NBS products in the new year. Until then, we will focus on getting Quest and NBS back on track, ensuring the administration processes are effective and efficient. Priorities include liaising with registered facilities, allocating new assessments and ensuring that all sites that have previously paid for assessments receive them. We are all very excited about the future and look forward to working with both new and registered centres over the next three years."

NBS data analysis and reporting will continue to be carried out by the Sport Industry Research Centre at Sheffield Hallam University. Peter Taylor, Professor of Sport Economics at the Sport Industry Research Centre said:

"We're delighted to continue our technical support for Sport England's National Benchmarking Service. Our researchers were in at the beginning of this service and we are very proud of its achievements over the last ten years. We look forward to helping Sport England to develop the service, providing even more useful evidence for sport and leisure facilities throughout the country."