Two leisure centres in Gateshead could be shut down after council bosses warned that services have become “unaffordable”.
It has emerged that the Gateshead Leisure Centre in Saltwell and the Dunston Leisure Centre are both in line to be closed for good, amid a funding crisis. The sports hall at Birtley Leisure Centre could also be under threat, though the town’s council leader has insisted that the closures are not yet a done deal, while the publicly-owned leisure services that remain open are set to be outsourced by the local authority.
Councillors were told on Tuesday morning that Gateshead Council had wanted to make its leisure centres and pools self-sufficient by 2020 but that such an aim was “no longer realistic” and they are “unaffordable” in their current state. Labour councillor Angela Douglas, the authority’s cabinet member for culture, sport, and leisure, said that “really difficult” decisions had to be made because of the crippling impact of Covid-19, the cost of living crisis, escalating maintenance and repair bills, problems with staffing, and ongoing economic uncertainty.
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The council had budgeted £2.2m to help prop up its leisure services in the current financial year, but is estimating that it will in fact have to pay almost double that at £4.3m to balance the books. A dire report also warns that the size, condition, and age of the town’s six leisure centres means they are not energy efficient and require essential maintenance work totalling a minimum £13.3m over the next decade – excluding Gateshead International Stadium.
A public consultation is now set to be launched before a final decision is made on which centres will shut – but the council says it is “critical” that some do close and those that “appear to be least sustainable and therefore more at risk of closure are Gateshead Leisure Centre, Dunston Leisure Centre and possibly the sports hall at Birtley Leisure Centre”. It comes after Heworth Leisure Centre was shut for eight weeks over the summer due to staff shortages.
Coun Jonathan Wallace, the council’s Lib Dem opposition leader, said at Tuesday’s cabinet meeting that efforts to make leisure services more sustainable should have started “well over a decade ago” and asked why Gateshead had been left in this position, at a time when Newcastle City Council is about to start building a new leisure centre in West Denton funded by a £20m Levelling Up grant from the government. Calling on Coun Douglas to resign, Coun Wallace accused the council of a “catalogue of errors” that had put locals off using Gateshead Leisure Centre – including complaints about its “complex” booking system, unreliable website, phones not being answered, gym membership being substantially pricier than competitors, and a slow reopening after Covid.
Labour council leader Martin Gannon told Coun Wallace that the decision on the two most at-risk centres had not been made yet. He added that Gateshead has built an international reputation based on sport and leisure, but council is now “half the size we were financially and in terms of capacity as well” – having had to slash £179m from its budget since 2010 and anticipating a £55m shortfall over the next five years.
Council chief executive Sheena Ramsey said that Gateshead was limited in the number of Levelling Up bids it could make and had chosen to focus on a bid to secure extra funding for the new Quayside arena development. Coun Gannon added that the solution to the crisis is that “the government needs to give us more money” and if there was a national grant funding scheme available to retain leisure services he would “pledge myself to it in blood”.
The council is now set to launch a procurement process for an outside contractor to run its leisure centres and pools for the next 10 to 15 years – but says this will not make the “immediate savings” needed to address the urgent budget issues. A final decision is expected to be made in January 2023 after a public consultation, while a separate review of Gateshead Stadium will also be conducted.
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