Help for Northumberland leisure facilities after pandemic leaves £4million black hole

Northumberland's leisure centres have been dealt blow after blow during the pandemic

As previously reported, Active Northumberland – the charitable trust that delivers leisure services for Northumberland County Council – is facing a deficit of around £4.3million (previously £4.5million) for the current financial year, largely due to its centres being closed through Covid-19.

But Cllr Jeff Watson, the cabinet responsible for leisure under his healthy lives portfolio, told the communities and place committee: “This council is fully aware of the contribution that is made to public health and I can assure you that the gap for this year has already been agreed to be funded by the county council.”

He added: “Who knows what’s going to happen next year, but – and I’m saying this more as an ordinary person than a cabinet member – we can’t walk away from our responsibilities for the health of the public and, as long as I’m there, I will make sure we don’t do anything like that.

“The idea of Active is that it will wash its face, in fact it will probably make a profit.

“The new outlets (new facilities are being built or upgraded in Berwick, Morpeth, Blyth and Newbiggin) are designed to run themselves and the revenue from them to create a surplus, we’re not looking to burden the ratepayers of Northumberland with something they can’t afford to have.”

His pledge came following a presentation about Active’s operations during 2019-20 and some of its goals going forward, but questions from the committee members were primarily concerned with the financial position and the impacts of the pandemic.

Asked about the deficit, Active’s head of operations, Paul Metcalfe, said: “It’s a bit of a crystal-ball moment at the minute. We don’t know how long this lockdown is going to last for, we don’t know how long it is before the injections are fully rolled out and social-distancing measures are reduced.

“What I can say is we are working with the council – and there’s no stone unturned – to look at every grant opportunity available to leisure trusts like our own to reduce the funding that’s required from NCC to sustain the company moving forward.

“At the minute, we are working with the council to try to get some of the £100million pot that the Department for Culture, Media and Sport has set out.

“We’ve all worked collaboratively to put papers together for that. If successful, that could bring in hopefully up to £750,000, which will reduce the subsidy required, but there’s no guarantee we’ll get it because every single leisure operator and trust in the country is grabbing the same small pot of money.

“As the operations manager, we are working in very, very constrained times when we can open. Our plan has always been to maximise the amount of people we can get into the facility safely and maximise the income as much as we can, but the capacity some of our facilities are operating at has been reduced by 75%.”

He added: “We are fully implementing the furlough scheme. When we came back in December, we didn’t bring back all of our facilities, to be honest it was the worst possible time we could reopen leisure centres because it’s our lowest usage month, so we fully utilised the furlough scheme and only brought back the minimum amount of staff.

“I am confident as a company that we will do everything we can to absolutely minimise the impact on the council’s budget.”

Nigel Walsh, the council’s head of cultural services, added: “Paul talked about the economic impact on the day-to-day running, but we need to get very close to understanding what the impacts of Covid on society are going forward.

“There’s people’s sentiments towards group gatherings, and the emergence and people’s feelings towards online exercise, which has been available for free, so we’re going to need to be very close to customer and resident perception and sentiment to make sure we offer the right opportunities in the right way. It may well be an increased mix of digital as well as physical.

“In terms of future-proofing the facilities we are putting in, we are doing Covid audits of the new builds to ensure they are as future-proofed as possible.”

The comprehensive report, which covered the current arrangements for monitoring the performance of Active Northumberland, its performance information for 2019-20, and its draft service plan for 2021-22, had been due to go before the committee’s meeting in December, but had to be deferred to Wednesday, January 13.

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