At the end of April, Sport England released the latest Active Lives Survey data for all adults in England between November 2020 to November 2021. The report produced by Sport England includes a summary of the coronavirus timeline, with the implications restrictions had on our day to day lives.

For Suffolk, 59.7% of adults were meeting chief medical officer recommendations of 150+ minutes of physical activity each week, a decrease of 3.4% from the survey's data in the previous 12 months. Nationally, 61.4% of adults are classified as active, with Suffolk a slight 1.6% below the national average.

Data can be viewed within our report on the Suffolk breakdown, which can be viewed by clicking the adjacent image - this provides local authority level data, as well as a nearest neighbour analysis, and Eastern region Active Partnership comparison.

An interactive PowerBI dashboard of the data can be viewed here.

Meanwhile, the Sport England Active Lives survey report can be viewed by clicking here.

The former Bike Life survey by Sustrans is now called the Walking and Cycling Index - studying walking, wheeling and cycling. It has highlighted the issue of pavement parking in urban areas across the UK and determined that banning pavement parking would help 70% of residents to walk or wheel more.

The survey was completed by 24,000 people from 18 cities and areas across England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland - the survey looked at infrastructure, travel behaviours, the impact of cycling and new initiatives. In addition to the findings on banning pavement parking, 72% of residents believe wider pavements would allow them to walk or wheel further; pavement parking is currently banned in London, with the UK government considering extending this across England.

The Office for National Statistics has conducted analysis into working patterns as we get used to the 'new normal' after all coronavirus restrictions caused by the pandemic have been removed. The Opinions and Lifestyle Survey (OPN) found that almost half of working adults were working at home at times during the pandemic, with most of these individuals planning to continue to work both at home, and in the workplace in the future.

Over 8 in 10 workers who had to work from home during the pandemic said they planned to hybrid work going forwards; rising from 13% of workers utilising hybrid work in February 2022 to 24% in May 2022. This is twinned with the number of people working from home exclusively dropping from 22% to 14% in the same period. There are some really insightful graphs within the report detailing attitudes to home working and hybrid working, which are well worth a view - the most dominant segment includes individuals who plan to work mostly from home and sometimes from my usual place of work in February 2022, at 42%.

Interestingly, hybrid working was more common among those in higher income brackets, and was the most common working pattern for those earning £40,000 or more, while travelling to work was the most common working pattern among all other income groups.