The Governing Body for Athletics in the United Kingdom
After a six months long consultation process during 1998 UK Athletics was established early in 1999 with a remit to work under three key principles:
- It should co-ordinate and support, rather than intervene, govern or control.
- It should be designed to be effective, rather than be driven by political or representative concerns
- It should have defined and stronger links with clubs and athletes.
In practice six key roles for the new UK body were defined
- To develop UK-wide strategy for performance, development and competition, through a highly consultative annual planning process (e.g. workshops, interviews and open forums, culminating in an Annual Congress every December, open to all affiliated club members).
- To develop high quality UK-wide programmes and initiatives (e.g. education programmes for coaches, administrators and officials; initiatives for attracting newcomers to athletics).
- To monitor the performance of all the different parts of the sport in implementing UK-wide strategy.
- To develop rules and anti-doping policy (as in the past), but to use debate at the Annual Congress to receive feedback on controversial issues.
- To lead and co-ordinate the sport’s commercial, marketing and internal communication activities.
- To develop and nurture UK-level and international relationships (e.g.UK Sports Council, BOA, IAAF, EAA.
Within these objectives an advisory and certification service would be established along with processes for risk assessment across the disciplines of the sport.