"Sports centres and swimming pools that should be helping millions regain fitness have been left crumbling and neglected, a bleak watchdog report found yesterday. [LINK]
At a time of growing crisis over poor health and obesity among both children and adults, the standard of public sports facilities is poor and getting worse despite £1 billion a year budget, it said.
The scathing findings from the Audit Commission blamed incompetent and indifferent town hall bureaucrats and a reluctance to spend money on sport as chief reasons for delapidation and decline.
It warned that despite widespread enthusiasm over the 2012 Olympics, the number of new sports centres getting built is actually going down.
Lottery money to pay for new ones is drying up, it added. More than two out of three pools and leisure complexes are more than two decades old, the investigation found."
But the Audit Commission said that public sector sports facilities were making 'slow and uncertain' progress; that few bureaucrats had bothered to work out what people needed and might want in the future; and that local council running of pools and sports centres was 'weak'. ...
The report was published in the wake of Labour's latest initiative to encourage children to take exercise, a £5.5 million scheme for swimming lessons for 11-year-olds who cannot manage 25 yards. Critics of the plan this week said it was hard to teach swimming to children who have no local pool. ...
Councils had made money from contracting out pools and leisure centres to be run by private companies but had failed to plough it back into new facilities.
Copyright 2008 London Pools Campaign