Earlier this year the City Council's Labour leadership announced that some swimming pools in Birmingham might close. Local Conservatives have been consulting residents about what should happen to our local centres and residents want to see them remain open.
Indeed there was all-party agreement between councillors in this area that they should all remain open.
However the Council has so far refused to confirm that local swimming pools will remain open and now some local user groups are being told that the Pool's locally may indeed close.
Erdington Conservatives will be campaigning to save them. To save them there will likely need to be changes to the way they are run, no one is denying this. However for the Council to just close these valuable facilities without even trying to modernise and save them for our local community would be disgrace.
The campaign will be led by Erdington Parliamentary Spokesman Cllr Robert Alden and helped by Gary Sambrook, Ewan Mackey and Clifton Welch. The online petition to save the Leisure Centre’s is at the bottom of the page.
What's shocking about this is the following:
- it was agreed on all sides that we could save pools by bringing in private management or doing other deals with the private sector. This has been done successfully in other places - but something the Labour City Council leadership seems to have decided not to bother trying for our local leisure centre’s and swimming pools.
- the council states its policy is to target resources at areas of deprivation. Yet Kingstanding and Castle Vale Leisure centre’s are based in areas the Council state are deprived yet they are likely to close them anyway.
- These decisions were meant to be taken by the local Erdington district committee. The views of the committee appear to being overridden by Labour Council leader Sir Albert Bore.
It appears our community is being sold out by the City Council.