Sir,

Pembrokeshire County Council’s proposal to hive off the county’s Leisure Service into a charitable trust is an ill thought-out, short term solution driven by cost cutting and questionable accountancy.

Charitable Trusts have been used to run leisure centres before, both locally - the old Haverfordwest Swimming Pool and Tenby Swimming Pool - and nationally as in Neath and Port Talbot and some authorities in London. Yet it would appear that the very well paid consultants employed by Pembrokeshire County Council have conveniently failed to note the failings of these experiences.

In the case of Haverforwest and Tenby, the council had to go through a painful and costly process of dismantling these local trusts in order to build new, modern centres. While in other local authorities, trust managed centres have led to closures and service reductions - cuts delivered at an arm’s length from council control and public accountability.

The much vaunted ‘savings’ of these trusts revolves around the non payment of rates (a smoke and mirror accounting trick of saving a payment into one national government pot, while conveniently forgetting the balancing government settlement funds coming back the other way to local authorities).

The biggest cost factors for leisure centres is not rates; it is the high energy cost of heating large amounts of water, refurbishments and capital repayments. To meet these costs, every swimming pool has to be subsidised from the public purse, but it is a price worth paying as every pound spent is more than repaid by reduced illness and consequent lower demands on our over-stretched health services.

Pembrokeshire has since the late 1990s invested some £25milion (the vast majority of which came from Lottery and European grants) in a new generation of swimming pools and leisure centres. This public sports provision, shared with school use and allied to Pembrokeshire’s vibrant community sports club networks, has led to Pembrokeshire having both the best per capita level of public indoor sports facilities provision and the best sports participation rates in the country.

This is an achievement that Pembrokeshire should be proud of and determined to defend. Siphoning off our public leisure centres into a charitable trust will be like giving away the family silver.

A Trust will, far from defending the service, lay it open to cuts and closures by the back door. The charity type model may work for local community sports clubs that do not have to maintain expensive swimming pools; but it is inconceivable that a voluntary style trust would have the capacity to sustain a countywide leisure centre stock worth over £25million.

I fear that this poorly considered proposal will only serve to: a) feather the nests of another set of consultants fees (maybe the same consultants that made the recommendation in the first place!) to legally establish a large and complicated trust and b) provide a convenient, non county council, buffer for cuts and closures.

I appeal to our elected councillors to stand up and be counted - keep our Leisure Service in house and be prepared to fight for the funding necessary to sustain what has hitherto been an exemplary public service. Passing the buck to an anonymous board of trustees and a legally complicated trust structure will not do!

John Deason,

Llanwnda,

Pembrokeshire.