Sports and leisure services review

This consultation looks at ways to improve our leisure centres, how we can encourage more people to use them through proposed investment, and small changes to swimming pool opening times. Our proposals aim to substantially increase the number of people using our leisure centres, particularly if we improve gym and fitness facilities and improve the look and feel of our bigger leisure centres.

 

We also want to become more efficient in the way we run our leisure centres and make savings in areas where we can reduce costs. We have looked at the way people use our leisure centres, when they are busy, and when they are less so, and which centres have the potential to increase the number of customers using them.

 

These proposals are part of wider plans to improve our leisure centres which will also see investment in the routine maintenance of services (including new air conditioning systems in the six oldest swimming pools) improvements to on-line booking, an improved choice of fitness classes and better marketing of our services.

 

There are no proposals to close leisure centres even though many other local authorites have done this to meet budget challenges. The council wants to carry on running the leisure centres in-house (that is, not comissioning a third party to run them on our behalf). 

 

We are proposing the following changes;

 

The proposals that we are consulting on are part of plans to achieve some savings and increase our income, to the combined amount of £1.5 million over the next three years.

Sports services provide a broad range of leisure facilities across the city with over 2.1 million individual visits to our facilities every year. 

 

We want people to continue to use and enjoy our leisure facilities and to also encourage more people to use them. We would like to invest in our facilities to make sure people have the best possible experience to improve their health and wellbeing.

 

It’s therefore important that we consult on the proposals so that we can take on-board feedback. We need to understand how people feel about any proposed changes to how we run our leisure facilities before any final decisions are made. This is why we are asking members of the public, people who use our services and staff and partner organisations to comment on our proposed changes.