Leisure centres fear closures or cuts to jobs and services
LEISURE centres in Derbyshire could have their facilities cut back, hours reduced, staff made redundant, or be fully closed if the Government does not provide support.
At a Derbyshire Dales District Council meeting on November 24, members agreed to give £204,000 to Freedom Leisure – a charity which runs four leisure centres on behalf of the authority.
This was after the charity – which runs facilities in Ashbourne, Bakewell, Matlock and Wirksworth – came to the council saying that without financial support it would be facing serious issues due to the rising cost of energy bills.
One of the options, it had said, was to close pools in Ashbourne, Bakewell and Matlock due to the surging cost of heating them.
Councillors agreed to bank-roll the company this year, but held off on approving a requested further £434,000 for the next financial year – from April 1.
Jeremy Rowe, operations director for Freedom Leisure, said the charity wanted to keep facilities at their current level, but without further support it would have to consider all available options – including closing leisure centres.
He said: “This is not a Freedom Leisure issue, it is a whole economy issue that’s touching many businesses. Obviously, it affects us considerably because swimming pools are very expensive and energyheavy facilities to operate.”
Mr Rowe said reducing services, reviewing opening hours or the facilities the centres offer would all be considered “to maintain the stability of the contract”.
A suggestion it put forward includes middle management redundancies and closures of pools, with pool temperatures already reduced by 2C.
Ash Watts, the council’s director of community and environmental services, said the authority would use money which had been for previous Government Covid support to prop up the company until the end of the financial year.
He said: “What we need to be mindful of is that leisure centres are just recovering after that Covid impact. It took quite a while for leisure centres to get back to the point of a level of revenue that they had been experiencing before that.
“We believe that, whilst obviously we don’t want to be paying any funds out, it is not an unreasonable request.”
Mr Watts, talking about financial viability next March, when more funding or decisions like pool closures, redundancies and shorter hours could be enforced, said: “We are going to have some really difficult decisions to make, and this may very well be one of those, depending on central Government.”
Cllr Steve Flitter, leader of the Liberal Democrat Group, said ideas to invest to save may help in the future but would not solve the immediate problem. He said the council had been underfunded by Government for decades and needed to make its own “challenging decisions”, including how much money it can give to others.
Cllr Richard Bright, an independent councillor, asked about the possibility of mothballing leisure centres, saying: “This is not something that is going to go away. We have a massive issue with power generation in this country. We haven’t invested in it for the past 30 years.
“The problem is not going away. So for us to just sit here and think it’s going to be okay in March or that it is going to be a bit better in March…it ain’t going to happen.”
He said mothballing may need to be considered and that private sector leisure and gym companies were already doing the same and looking at reducing services.
Mr Watts responded: “This is something we have talked about, it is obviously not something we want to happen but we have talked about every eventuality. Closures of sites means talking about redundancies, and that is something we want to avoid.”
Cllr Paul Cruise called for solar panels on leisure centre roofs and on stands above car parking areas, in a bid to drive down energy costs.
The agreement will see Freedom Leisure given £204,000 out of the £272,000 extra cost it has experienced with bills, with this money to be restricted to the Dales, and further options for the next financial year will be looked at in January.
The council is currently paying Freedom Leisure £3.2 million over 10 years to run the four leisure centres.
Over the course of 2020, the council agreed payments totalling £712,171 to support Freedom Leisure through the pandemic and periods in which leisure centres were either forced to close or had drastically reduced footfall due to social distancing and public health and safety.