Councils Charging for Free Outdoor Exercise Classes: What's Going On
A report published on 6 September 2026 by the Campaign for Freedom in Everyday Life finds that 19 councils across England and Wales require instructors to hold licences — paying fees, filing paperwork, and holding first-aid certification — before running outdoor exercise classes in public parks and beaches. The schemes apply even to free or donation-based community sessions.
The report, titled "Banned from the Beach: the Crackdown on Outdoor Community Sport," is led by Josie Appleton, director of the Campaign for Freedom in Everyday Life. It profiles several instructors who have scaled back or stopped their community sessions because of licensing demands, and examines councils that have introduced or expanded permit regimes for outdoor fitness activity in public spaces The Guardian.
Among the cases highlighted is Angela Brier-Stephenson, a yoga instructor in Thanet. The council told her she needed to pay £1,200 a year under its seasonal licensing scheme. She has not run her beach yoga class for the past two summers as a result. Thanet has since reduced its fitness activity licensing fee to £300 for the 2026 season, though the earlier figure already forced a two-year break in her sessions.
Bristol is another focal point. Julia Turner, a Bristol resident, is resisting a £100 fee to run her BYOB (bring your own baby) choir in parks, with sessions priced at £8 each. Chloe Broomby, also in Bristol, said licensing fees made it impossible to run her weekly, donation-based qigong classes on the Downs. Ailie Tam, who taught community yoga in St George Park for six years, stopped her sessions after licensing fees were introduced. Bristol city council's outdoor exercise licensing scheme does include discounted rates of up to 75% for small businesses and charitable organisations, though the instructors profiled in the report say these reductions do not go far enough for community-scale, low-cost activities.
Bristol councillor Stephen Williams, who chairs the public health and communities policy committee, defended the scheme. He said the licence fees cover the cost of administering the scheme and that the framework ensures businesses operating in public spaces are insured and act responsibly. The council's position is that licensing provides a safeguarding and liability structure for activities that, while often community-oriented, are nonetheless commercial in nature when any money changes hands The Guardian.
The tension is not new. A BBC investigation found that more than 40% of local authorities in the UK charge for fitness classes in their public parks, though that finding dates to 2012 BBC News. In 2021, Surrey Heath council suspended the fees it charged professional fitness instructors for permits to run classes in borough parks, with the suspension lasting until the end of September that year. Neither the BBC figure nor the Surrey Heath suspension is cited in the new report, but both provide context for a dispute that has persisted for well over a decade without resolution.
The Campaign for Freedom in Everyday Life's report frames the licensing regimes as a disproportionate burden on volunteer and low-income community activity, arguing that requirements designed for commercial operators are being applied indiscriminately to people running free or donation-based sessions. The 19 councils identified have schemes that make no functional distinction between a for-profit boot camp charging £15 per head and a community yoga class operating on donations, the report contends.
The broader context here is that local authorities must navigate two policy currents at once. Post-pandemic public health messaging has stressed the value of outdoor activity, social connection, and accessible exercise, particularly in deprived communities. At the same time, councils face acute budgetary pressure and a duty-of-care obligation — the legal responsibility to ensure that activities on public land are insured and properly managed. The licensing schemes are, in the councils' framing, an attempt to reconcile those imperatives. In the instructors' framing, the cure is worse than the disease: fees and bureaucracy suppress precisely the low-cost, community-led activity that public health policy should be encouraging.
The 75% discount available in Bristol illustrates the gap between the two positions. A fee reduced by three-quarters still represents a fixed cost that a donation-based instructor may struggle to recover, particularly when session prices are £8 or less. For a commercial operator charging £15–£20 per participant across a full class, the same fee is trivial. The structural complaint running through every case in the report is that flat-fee licensing is inherently regressive — it falls hardest on those with the thinnest margins — when applied to activities of vastly different commercial scale.
The question the report ultimately raises is whether local authorities can develop licensing frameworks that distinguish between commercial fitness enterprises and community-scale activity without creating enforcement loopholes or administrative complexity that defeats the purpose. Thanet's fee reduction from £1,200 to £300 suggests some councils are responsive to the pressure. Whether that adjustment is sufficient to bring instructors like Brier-Stephenson back to the beach is, at this stage, an open question.
