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Centre of attraction
• HOW will an “edifice complex” – new buildings – encourage people to exercise when the range of activities available at Finsbury Leisure Centre is already one of the widest in the UK? “You can take a horse to water but you cannot make him drink” springs to mind.
Improving the health of the 70 per cent of local people who don’t use the leisure centre complex is what the £23 million projected spending, mostly on buildings, is about.
Instead of new buildings, why not try to find out why people don’t use the centre more to exercise. The centre’s fees are low, it is clean and staff are skilled and helpful.
There are better ways to spend scarce EC1 New Deal for Communities (EC1 NDC) money. Islington Council owns the buildings and it is up to it to find the money to rebuild or improve them.
Of the £200,000 budgeted for the centre’s rebuild feasibility, already £22,636 is known to have been spent by EC1 NDC. It needs to ask whether spending EC1 NDC money on new buildings is a logical way to improve people’s health, given the quite adequate sport and exercise facilities already in place.
Councillor Ruth Polling, executive member for leisure, could only give a languid answer when asked where the £23 million needed to rebuild would come from, in view of the credit crisis (Project will be viable, December 14).
More detail would be appreciated as we are paying her £45,029 as executive leisure member. Councillors’ enthusiasm for new buildings may not be unconnected with the 2010 borough elections. Political motivation, even among the highest-minded politicians, is seldom pure. And EC1 NDC appointed resident board members certainly do not need a legacy after EC1 NDC ends in 2011 as they represent only a very small minority – themselves.
The best that consultants Continuum Sport and Leisure could come up with in its first feasibility report was to get more local use “through the design and management options which the study will look to develop, as well as clear information through press releases and further public and community consultation”. I hope they can do better than that.
LEO CHAPMAN
Dufferin Street, EC1 |
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