The All-Party Parliamentary Group for Sport, chaired by former sports minister Gerry Sutcliffe, plans to devise a 10-year strategy for sport which it wants every major political party to include in their own election manifestos next year.
A cross-party consensus over sport is thought to be unprecedented, with such formal pre-election agreements on other areas of policy tending to be reserved for wartime or other national emergencies.
But those who champion sport inside Westminster have grown increasingly concerned about the extent to which it has fallen down the list of Government priorities since the Olympics and Paralympics and believe the country risks heading for an irreversible decline in physical activity.
The infighting within the Conservative Party over cuts in school sport funding highlighted how damaging a lack of joined-up thinking could be, while the Prime Minister's last cabinet reshuffle – in which the highly-rated Hugh Robertson was moved to the Foreign Office – sent a message that sport would face even more of a fight for attention in future.
Sport England's most recent Active People Survey, meanwhile, showed participation in sport in England fell by more than 50,000 between December 2012 and December 2013.
Sutcliffe told the Telegraph Sport: "I don't want to see what's happened in other nations post-Olympics and Paralympics, where the bubble has burst and participation rates drop.
"We know that elite athletes are funded to 2016 and that the 'whole sport plans' are there until 2017 but we've got to look beyond that. We've got to have a 10-year plan in my view."
Sutcliffe was confident any cross-party manifesto, which he plans to present to each party at the end of the year, could survive the brutal partisanship of a General Election campaign – even one as close as 2015's is predicted to be.
He said: "There are always competing interests in terms of manifestos. But our aim is to give sufficient time for people to endorse that manifesto.
"We will have to battle but if we don't have anything ready or don't have a view then it will get lost as different priorities compete for Government support."
The manifesto could include a budget and is likely to highlight how investment in sport can ultimately result in huge savings in other Government departments.
Sutcliffe, the Labour MP for Bradford South who was sports minister between 2007-10, added: "Sport can influence policy areas in other departments, whether that's Health – in terms of well-being – Education – in terms of developing individuals – and even the Home Office. After all, the busiest place in a prison is the gym."
The all-party group plans to consult as widely as possible for manifesto ideas, including speaking to sports groups within parliament and sports bodies themselves.
But Sutcliffe said it would also welcome ideas from members of the public, including from readers of the The Telegraph.
"It's important to develop a scale of interest in this, not only from sports bodies.
"I think individuals have got a lot to contribute here and so it'd be great to hear what people think are the priorities and where they think the investment should be."
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