Essex County Council says it is unwilling to throw money from a £10m Sport England grant into Zumba classes.

The county is to benefit from a £10.6m grant to improve the health and wellbeing of the county.

Despite the county being one of the UK’s largest and most diverse, approximately 22 per cent of the population in Essex are classified as inactive, at a cost of around £58million to the NHS every year.

Dr Mike Gogarty, director of wellbeing, public health and communities at Essex County Council, told the Health and Wellbeing Board at County Hall on Wednesday (March 20): “The position is we have been awarded substantial amount of resource and we have now got to ensure this resource is appropriately used and we best use that to improve systems, but that we do it in a way to add value to the national and international learning, otherwise we are wasting our time with it.

“We have agreed a number of areas – such as community led approaches, the opportunity to impact on the environment and both testing what works locally and importantly testing how we develop that at scale.

“The approach needs to be sustainable.

“If you looks at things that improve physical activity, exercise classes and the others count for a very small amount – just 10 to 15 per cent.

“The vast majority is a mixture of culture change and environment change.

“I am very keen that we don’t just give it to Zumba classes but we look at how we start changing community perceptions.”

Essex was chosen by Sport England at the end of 2017 as one of 12 areas in England to undertake the ground breaking work because of the range of significant problems and opportunities which exist in the county.

The focus on using physical activity to tackle the worst social and health inequalities aims to increase physical activity, in particular targeting people who currently do under 30 minutes of physical activity per week and who live in the most deprived communities.

The scheme also aims to achieve wider social and economic outcomes e.g. stronger, healthier, cohesive communities and improved equality, transformational change – a shared vision among system leaders, realignment of system budgets and using robust evidence that allows replication of success at scale.

Chairman of the committee, Cllr John Spence, who is helping draw up the best ways to make best use of the investment, said: “It is £10.6m devoted primarily to Basildon, Tendring and Colchester where the level of deprivation is highest but the requirement on us is to ensure the longevity of impact and the ubiquity of passing it out across the county, so it is not that we just see the benefits in those three areas – that we understand how to transfer the knowledge and expertise.”