European Affairs

EHFA carried the health and fitness sector's case to the European institutions through its European Affairs Working Group. The group's purpose was as much defensive as promotional: policy made in Brussels reached the sector whether or not the sector was in the room when it was made.

The sector's difficulty was that it belonged cleanly to neither of the two policy areas that might have housed it. Sport had a basis in the European treaties and a line in the European budget; public health remained largely a national competence, with a limited and mostly coordinating European role. Fitness - an industry of public and private facilities whose product was exercise - sat between the two: too commercial to be treated as sport, too close to health to be treated as leisure. The practical consequence was that a substantial sector was largely invisible in European policy unless it argued its own case, which is what the working group was for.

The European Affairs Working Group worked to four objectives:

• To protect EHFA members from bad policy, legislation or new regulation.
• To identify new opportunities for members by keeping them aware of new policy developments.
• To build support for the European health and fitness sector among politicians.
• To raise the profile of the sector among decision makers.

Those objectives describe work that is mostly unglamorous and mostly early: reading proposals while they are still drafts, responding to consultations before positions harden, and making sure that officials who write about sport or about health know that fitness exists.

EHFA was created in 2001 as a not-for-profit organisation and operated from the United Kingdom until it opened offices in Brussels on 1 December 2007, to be closer to the centre of European government. In February 2008 the association's board and partners met representatives of the European Commission's Sport Unit in DG Education and Culture, at the European Parliament in Brussels, to discuss the issues arising from the Commission's White Paper on Sport. The meeting is a fair illustration of how the association worked in Brussels: put the sector in front of the people drafting the policy, and keep the contact going.

Vocational education and training was the longest-running thread, because it was where the association had something concrete to offer. The qualifications work described in the standards section was itself a contribution to European policy on education, and the EU-funded projects behind it were the proof that the sector could deliver a framework rather than ask for one.

Taxation was a second. The treatment of fitness services for value added tax differed between member states, and the association's May 2011 response to the European consultation on VAT argued that tax treatment shaped whether people could afford to use fitness facilities - which made it a public health question as well as a commercial one.

Physical activity and health policy was the third and largest. The association argued that inactivity is a health problem rather than a leisure preference, and that the sector delivering exercise should therefore be treated as part of the answer. Its main occasions for making that argument were the meetings it convened. At the London Summit in November 2010 officials of the European Commission addressed the sector, as recorded in the archive entry on the Commission at the London Summit, and the following year the sector set out the priorities it would put to the institutions at the Brussels industry summit, reported in the summit statement.

The working group sat within the association's structure alongside the bodies described on the working groups page, and its output - consultation responses, position papers and summit statements - is recorded in the news archive.