Council swims against tide of public opinion
CALLS TO REOPEN POOL ARE REJECTED
NEWCASTLE City Council has rejected calls to bring a closed swimming pool in the outer west back under its control and prevent it from being permanently shut.
The West Denton Pool has been closed since the first Covid lockdown last year, much to the anger of locals who fear it will never open again.
Operators Greenwich Leisure Limited (GLL) chose the site as one of three, alongside Eldon Leisure and the Walker Activity Dome, that would be closed indefinitely when it announced 35 job losses in the city last September.
But ruling councillors in Newcastle have refused a request to have the pool brought back under the control of the local authority.
At a council meeting on Wednesday night, Callerton and Throckley councillor Ian Donaldson claimed that the privatisation of swimming pools in Newcastle had failed and that a company based in London will “never” look out for the interests of the outer west of Newcastle.
Coun Donaldson, the Newcastle Independents party’s only councillor, warned that a generation of youngsters in the area could be left unable to swim if the pool stays shut as the nearest alternative facilities are as far away as Blaydon and Ponteland.
His motion urging the council to “look towards taking back in-house the West Denton pool” failed, as Labour councillors passed their own version that instead called on the
government to stump up the funding needed to save publicly-owned leisure centres.
Labour councillor Simon Barnes told the meeting that the city council was forced to contract out the running of the pool in order to protect it from massive budget cuts forced on the local authority since 2010. The Denton and Westerhope ward councillor added that the pool had been a financially viable prospect prior to the pandemic hitting and blamed its continued closure on ministers’ failure to offer sufficient support to leisure centres.
However, his Labour colleague Linda Wright later said she felt the “writing was on the wall” when GLL closed a training pool at the centre before Covid and that GLL had “grasped the opportunity” to shut the entire facility when the pandemic hit.
Newcastle North MP Catherine McKinnell has previously called on GLL to promise that the pool will not be permanently closed.
The non-profit enterprise has said that the loss of income caused by lockdown closures and the need to operate at a reduced capacity for social distancing has been “impossible to recoup” and that “indoor facilities at Walker Activity Dome, Eldon Leisure Centre and West Denton Swimming Pool will remain closed for the foreseeable future”.
The council issued a £1.6m loan to GLL last year from an emergency Covid relief fund, but it was not sufficient to keep every GLL-run leisure facility in the city open.
Independent councillor Sandra Davison told Wednesday’s meeting that anything less than the pool being reopened and improved with new investment would be a “betrayal of the people of the outer west”.
Fellow Chapel ward representative Marc Donnelly also pointed out that neighbouring North Tyneside Council runs all of its own leisure centres and that Northumberland is investing £65m in new facilities.