Sport England’s 2019 Active Lives Adult Survey shows that 63% of adults in England undertake at least 150 minutes’ worth of exercise a week, compared to the 51% revealed by Statistics Jersey’s Opinion and Lifestyle Survey last year.
However, the number of adults deemed ‘inactive’ appears to be lower in Jersey, with a larger proportion falling into the middle, ‘fairly active’ category.
Around 15% of Islanders surveyed at random in 2019 admitted they failed to exercise for more than 30 minutes a week – a figure that jumps to 25% in England.
Jersey Sport chief executive Catriona McAllister said: ‘If you look at the stats in Jersey it would appear that we are lagging behind.
‘However, that is only referring to those who reach the 150 minutes a week. We have fewer people who are classed as physically inactive and more people in the middle, who are not quite getting up to 150 minutes but are still doing something. In England they have a higher percentage of people not doing enough.
‘Our job is to move the people doing less than 30 minutes into the “fairly active” category [30-149 minutes per week] and move the “fairly active” up to achieving over 150 minutes a week.’
Ms McAllister added that discussions were ongoing with Sport England to ensure that future reports, which are often based on subjective responses, can be compared with greater validity.
‘Unless we ask the questions in the same way it is hard to compare like-for-like,’ she explained. ‘You don’t know if it is actually different or if it’s just because of the way the question is asked.
‘We have had good conversations with Sport England and are looking to align closer with them, while still doing it ourselves on-Island.’
Sport England found that those working at the lower end of the pay scale are less likely to be active, although Ms McAllister said she would like to investigate that correlation further in Jersey due to the physical nature of some of the Island’s more popular industries.
