In her latest comment for Rye News, Sally-Ann Hart, MP for Hastings and Rye, expresses her concerns at the closure of Rye swimming pool and the importance of fighting for community assets.
As of Tuesday, November 1, Freedom Leisure closed the swimming pool at Rother District Council-owned Rye Sports Centre.
Many residents from Rye and surrounding villages have written to me about this. I am very disappointed that not only has this action has been taken but that it has been taken despite Rye community coming together on October 22 to physically demonstrate their strong feelings, a petition against the closure with thousands of signatures being lodged and fundraising efforts being made, we have not been able to persuade the local authority or Freedom Leisure to keep the pool open due to current crippling energy costs.
As soon as Cllrs. Gennette Stevens, Lizzie Hacking and Paul Osborne informed me some three weeks ago of the issue, I immediately wrote to the relevant minister to highlight this specific case, as well as Rother District Council and the CEO of Freedom Leisure, Ivan Horsfall Turner, to voice my concerns and those of my constituents, and to ask them to review their decision. I have since written to the chancellor and I am currently drumming up support from colleagues to petition the chancellor for urgent support for local authority owned (i.e. public sector) leisure and sports centres.
Freedom Leisure is a not-for-profit organisation which manages many local authority leisure centres, including Rye Sports Centre. I met with Mr Horsfall Turner a couple of days before the public demonstration. He explained to me the financial challenges that the organisation faces due to the 300% plus increase in energy bills and that Freedom Leisure, being a not-for-profit organisation without the financial reserves that a private sector business might have, simply cannot meet these huge increases in energy costs. He had asked Rother District Council for extra funding, but it too is feeling the pinch and cannot dip further into much-depleted reserves.
Before writing to the chancellor, I arranged a meeting with Swim England, the national governing body for swimming in England. I had asked them for statistics – evidence to support why it is so important to keep our local swimming pool here in Rye open. Swim England’s Value of Swimming report highlights a range of benefits of swimming, including saving the NHS over £357 million each year and 1.4 million adults in Britain feeling that swimming had significantly reduced their symptoms of anxiety or depression. More relevant to Hastings and Rye constituency is that by 2030, Swim England forecast that Rother local authority area will be short of the water space it needs to meet local demand by the equivalent of two 25 metre swimming pools. Similarly, Hastings local authority area is also forecast to be short of such water space by the equivalent of two 25 metre swimming pools. It is clear therefore that, according to this data, the closure of any pool within Hastings and Rye will only exacerbate the problem.
We all know that the closure of the pool will have a huge impact on individuals, families and children living not only in Rye, but also in the surrounding rural villages. This is not just about the jobs, with swimming teachers and lifeguards sadly losing their jobs and the impact of this. It is also about the fact that local people need to have access to the leisure, health and well-being which was offered in Rye.
Closing the pool robs our community of a vital asset which is used by many people for different reasons. For example, the pool has a disabled ramp which is rather uncommon, providing support for people with disabilities to access swimming. Twelve local schools use the pool for swimming lessons – learning to swim is vitally important for children, especially as we live in a coastal community.
The government is giving substantial support which will be made available to businesses to help buffer them against rising energy costs through the Energy Bill Relief Scheme. However, from discussions with the organisations I have engaged with, it is clear that the support for non-profit-making public sector leisure businesses will not be enough to keep many of their community pools open due to the explosive rise in energy costs (taking Freedom Leisure’s total annual energy cost bill from £8 million to £22 million). Having supported such businesses throughout the pandemic, we cannot allow them to fail now.
I have therefore written to the chancellor making the case above and that public sector pools need to be treated as a vulnerable sector in the upcoming review, with more targeted support to be made available now. In addition, in order for not-for-profit organisations like Freedom Leisure to plan and hopefully keep pools open during the winter months, details of what support will be available beyond March 31 2023 need to be announced as soon as possible.
Our mayor, Andi Rivett, and Cllr. Rebekah Gilbert have also been stalwarts in the fight to keep the pool open. We will all keep fighting for our community asset and things will get better.
Image Credits: Kt bruce .
Sally- Ann Hart refers to the depletion of Rother District Council’s reserves as one of the apparent reasons it cannot support the Rye Swimming Pool financially.
This allegation should be viewed in the context of how much Rother has spent (wasted?) on vast consultancy fees- our money- in respect of the renovation and redevelopment of the Bexhill Town Hall at an initial cost of £15m. This resulted in a recent planning application which I understand has now been refused and the redevelopment abandoned
Agree with Michael Miller. The topic of vast amounts of our money being spent on consultancy fees is a scandal that’s been going on for years in councils all over the country…often a waste of time and valuable resources that in house solutions could have been found as staff are intelligent enough to have sorted out.The fees consultancy charged are in some cases just rubber-stamping very simple and logical answers.
But how to solve this for more efficient way of running councils ?
There’s nothing at all irregular in what RDC did, as far as I can see. Indeed, we’d all be far more alarmed if professional studies had not been commissioned prior to proposed spending. Consultants are brought in precisely bcs local councils often do not have the requisite skills in house and they require independent perspectives. When the Town Hall plan was proposed to make a publicly-owned building fit for purpose and energy efficient etc, it made perfect sense. In the world in which we now live, all plans off, of course – and that’s *partly* to do with a complete lack of planning and scrutiny that preceded the Mini-Budget…
As to ‘waste and efficiency’, the consequence of the previous RDC administration not raising council tax for five years (2011-2016) leaves the present Council with a £900k hole in its accounts and depleted reserves just when it could most use the money. To me, given the value of the pool to our community and to our children, the sacrifice of this financial contingency now feels like a very substantial ‘waste’ indeed. So let’s get our priorities right.
Nobody wants to pay more tax, and nobody wants to get into tedious political point-scoring, but money has to come from somewhere if we want public amenities that benefit everyone in Rye.