To receive information on the review of the leisure services in Wiltshire.
Officer’s: Councillor Stuart Wheeler, Cabinet member for Leisure, Sport and Culture and Robin Townsend, Head of Leisure.
Minutes:
Councillor Stuart Wheeler, Cabinet member for Leisure, Culture and Sport explained that the consultation was currently going out across Wiltshire to review Leisure Facilities, following the formation of Wiltshire Council. The Council had inherited twenty three leisure centres across the county, in varied levels of care and repair needs.
To keep the leisure centres in the same condition that they were currently in would take £93 million over the next twenty five years. The Council would provide £117 million over the next twenty five years to carry out the proposals as detailed in the officer’s report. The idea would be to create a high quality service with reduced risk to the council.
Details of leisure facilities within the Southern Wiltshire community area were:
• Downton Leisure Centre was totally independent of Wiltshire Council.
• The Brian Whitehead Sports Centre Association (BWSCA) received an annual revenue grant of £50K from Wiltshire Council.
• The council had commissioned a report on the community trust options which may be of assistance to the BWSCA.
• Due to the independent nature of the Sports Centre there were no proposals to provide further capital funds to improve the facility.
• It was recognised that the annual revenue grant was not being considered as part of this report and would be considered later in the year.
People were then invited to ask questions, some of the comments were:
· In the event of Downton Leisure Centre closing, did Wiltshire Council (WC) have a contingency plan to rescue it. Answer: Wiltshire Council were not aware of any immediate threat to Downton Leisure Centre.
· Clarification was sought about whether Downton Leisure Centre was one of the leisure centres to be refurbished as it was listed as such on the WC website. Answer: Downton Leisure Centre was not one of the centres in line for refurbishment and the incorrect information would be removed from the website immediately.
· ]The catchment area for Downton leisure Centre was considered to be quite vast, had WC considered cross boarder talks with neighbouring authorities. Answer: Councillor Wheeler informed the Board that he and Robin Townsend would consider the issue of cross boarder communications. Robin added that the Sports England model had taken into account other facilities situated over the surrounding boundaries.
· The BWSC had been in financial difficulty for some time, could this be included as a consideration in the report for Cabinet.
· There was support for the initiatives for improvements planned for Salisbury’s Five Rivers Leisure Centre, in particular the climbing wall, which would benefit young people. However it was felt that Five Rivers was not user-friendly, with the swimming pool often taken up by special interest groups, and often not open for general swim.
· Could a rural discount card for rural residents be produced.
· Once the upgrading of facilities had taken place and WC had passed on the facilities to others to manage and maintain, there would be a huge financial responsibility for ongoing maintenance. Could the rules of how future R2 money could be used be changed to include using it for the maintenance of these leisure facilities.
· As Downton Leisure Centre was currently independent, once the other sites had been released to public groups to manage, would all leisure facilities be on equal footing. Answer: Yes, but not in a one size fits all. WC would not encourage people to take over a facility if it was thought that they would fail.
Councillor Wheeler informed the Board that he would take all of the comments on board and would look at exactly how the facilities were managed. WC were currently looking at fees, charges and concessions, it was hoped that a new method for paying for facilities would be implemented from April 2011.
Consultation started on 27 July 2010 and would end on 31 October 2010. There had been over 2,000 responses to date, all of which would be collated into a report and submitted to Cabinet in December 2010.
The spending proposals would be presented in the Cabinet Requirements document, which would need to be approved at the first meeting of the Full Council in 2011.