Tax on sport centres would be bad mistake

Recommendation for business rates hike would cause widespread closures, and should not be implemented

Yesterday, we heard the voice of independent education express serious concern about the Barclay Report proposals for business rates, which would see private schools lost the financial advantage that comes with being a charitable trust. Private education, we were told, would become more expensive, and more elitist.

Today, it is the turn of the leisure centres to express their dismay at facing the same fate.

The desirability or wisdom of asking private schools to pay full business rates is a complex matter. And even if business rates did apply, the schools would survive, albeit on an adjusted model.

For leisure centres, the outlook is bleak. Most public sporting facilities operate on the margins of viability, and measures have been taken in recent years to cut facilities, hours and staffing in a bid just to keep places open. Even with those measures, not all have survived. If the charitable trusts that run so many of the facilities have to pay business rates, we can expect a raft of closures of the sports centres and pools that so many have fought to keep open. These will be lost, and with them will go the only place the public can access sport facilities, which as well as being good for our health, also provide social benefits.

With such grim consequences, it is difficult to fathom how the Barclay Report has come to the conclusion that business rates should apply. Were the trusts who provide these services consulted, because if they were, they have been ignored.

Or has the role of trusts been misunderstood? There are 26 in operation across 24 of Scotland’s local authority areas. They were not set up to exploit a loophole; they are not-for-profit organisations, and the reality is that they emerged as a last chance to save sport, leisure and culture facilities from closure as local authorities had to make difficult budget cuts.

Of course, the Scottish Government does not have to implement all of the Barclay Report’s recommendations. Much of what the review has suggested makes sense, but the conclusion on sport, leisure and cultural facilities should be rejected. What the public purse would stand to gain is far outweighed by what would be lost.