4 ms·
I was in London in the first decade of the 2000s, and pools were closing left, right and centre then too. The councils are terribly badly run, and the old build
by b800h 3y ago
I was in London in the first decade of the 2000s, and pools were closing left, right and centre then too. The councils are terribly badly run, and the old buildings, with higher upkeep costs, are just too tempting to close when they're on a balance sheet with everything else.
- cjrp 3y agoAre they badly run, or just having to prioritise things like schools, social services, etc. over “luxuries” like leisure centres?
- mytailorisrich 3y agoMany are badly run (I gave two examples above). It does not mean that they don't face challenges in general because of cuts in funding. But, as always, bad management makes the shit hit the fan when times are leaner. I am convinced that it is possible to balance the books on a leisure centre, for instance.
- midasuni 3y agoHeating costs for pools quadrupled over the last 18 months. They’ve come down a bit, but that’s still a massive impact. Salaries have shot up too, and have done for 20 years, as minimum wage has increased well beyond average wages or inflation. But the largest impact on council funding in general is the increased money going into looking after the elderly, and that sometimes means selling off the land a leisure centre was on to pay for that for a couple of years, doesn’t matter that the centre was slightly profitable, it was occupying a large amount of land value that could be spent on Generation Me instead.
- lostlogin 3y agoIn the UK, I think schools and social services are broadly a central government thing, not local council. This gets less true with schemes like council housing.
- mytailorisrich 3y agoSchools are the responsibility of the local council. Then, "free schools" were created during Cameron's time as PM (Gove as Education Secretary), which are 'independent' of the local council.
- b800h 3y agoThere's actually remarkably little that they can decide properly for themselves these days, but they have low budgets, and eventually the low budgets lead to underqualified and overstretched staff, who then compound the problem with poor decisions.
- midasuni 3y agoFor anyone who might not realise in the 20s london had a labour mayor, and the U.K. had a labour government. The usual rebuttal is something along the lines of “no true labour”.
- lostlogin 3y agoAs bad as the mayor and councils may have been, from my outside perspective it would be hard to do as poorly as the UK government has over the last decade. It’s been farcical, and the show continues.