The study is billed as Europe’s largest survey of participation in sport and active recreation. It is a continuous telephone study that first started in October 2005, with almost 364,000 adults interviewed over the course of a year – a minimum of 1,000 people for each of the country’s 354 local authorities.

Ipsos Mori has run the survey each year since its inception. A new three-year contract is out for tender, covering three waves of the survey, with fieldwork slated to being in mid-October 2010 running to mid-October 2013.

The Active People Survey measures the proportion of adults that volunteer in sport on a weekly basis, club membership, involvement in organised sports or competitions, receipt of tuition or coaching and levels of satisfaction with sporting provision in the local community.

Results are used to measure Sport England’s progress in achieving its goal of getting more people actively involved in sport by 2013.

Full details on the contract, including how to submit a tender, can be found here.