Pure Gym founder and executive chair Peter Roberts has called on the government to abolish VAT on gym memberships to encourage more people to get active and lighten the load on the NHS.

Currently, the direct and indirect costs of inactivity in the UK are estimated to total £20bn a year and with the NHS needing to make extra savings of £8.2bn a year by 2020, Roberts believes more accessible gym memberships could help shift the emphasis onto prevention rather than cure. With VAT currently at 20 per cent, such a move could cut prices of gym memberships by as much as a fifth.

“There’s a tradition of everything being solved by pills, when a lot could be solved by exercise,” Roberts was quoted by the The Telegraph as saying.

With only 13 per cent of UK adults currently members of a health club, Roberts said the move could help increase this figure to around 20 per cent. European countries such as Norway offer a VAT exemption on gym memberships and it has a penetration rate of 19.6 per cent, according to the European Health & Fitness Market Report 2015.

Critics may point to the £10m profits posted by Pure Gym last year and say gyms don’t need further tax breaks, but with many other operators struggling in an increasingly competitive market and cost remaining the biggest barrier to physical activity for most consumers, there is evidence that the move could have nationwide implications for making exercise more accessible.

Calls for a VAT subsidy on gym memberships were first mooted more than a decade ago and have arisen several times since. The most recent was in 2013, when Roberts and then Fitness First chief executive Andrew Cosslett spoke out in favour of a cut. In terms of lobbying success, the fitness industry would do well to look to the example of the brewing industry, which has secured a series of concessions from the Treasury since George Osborne became Chancellor.

Meanwhile, The Gym Group CEO John Treharne said recently that independent gyms should lobby their local MPs to effect policy change.

He told Health Club Management: "For these businesses, I think lobbying local MPs to get behind physical activity is the most effective way to spread the message and ensure policymakers take note.”