City council holds sham Northbrook swimming pool closure consultation

When Exeter City Council leader Phil Bialyk announced last month that he would be cutting £3.5 million from the council’s 2025-26 budget, he didn’t mention Northbrook leisure centre in Beacon Lane, home to an established swimming school and nineteen metre pool.

Five days later, despite saying that next year’s budget aimed to “protect the services our residents rely on” he proposed nearly £600,000 of leisure services cuts at the council’s annual budget-setting meeting.

He said that “despite extensive efforts to drive income and footfall at Northbrook swimming pool since leisure services were brought back in house in 2020, low usage and revenue figures have seen little improvement.

“Combined with a projected increase in repairs and on-going costs to maintain the building, the future management of the building by Exeter City Council has become unsustainable.”

The council then announced a public consultation on the pool’s closure, three days after the cuts had been approved. It said it needed to “discuss the alternatives” with pool users. It also said that “the decision to close Northbrook swimming pool will only be considered after hearing from the community it serves and after assessing the impact of the potential closure.”

However it presented the consultation rather differently, when it opened a fortnight later. It said its leisure services are “heavily subsidised” at a cost of “around £1.2 million per year” and that Northbrook has had a “consistently low membership base” with a “resulting lack of income” which has “impacted its long-term viability”.

It added that it has now “become necessary to consult over the closure of the pool”, and that the consultation results would “help to assess the impact of closing the facility” – but not that they would help decide whether to keep it open.

A petition to prevent the pool’s closure had already been launched. 200 people signed it in its first three days and it has reached 725 signatures in the three weeks since then, and counting.

Eleni Greenwood, who started the petition, said the pool’s closure would deprive the community of “a vital facility in a less affluent area”. Another signatory claimed the council is unable to tell how many people use the pool, so its conclusion that it is used too little to stay open is wrong.

Northbrook swimming pool. Photo: Exeter City Council.

The council’s leisure services cuts follow a 2025-26 budget consultation which found only 30% of respondents agreeing with the council’s proposal to “reduce the subsidy on the six council run leisure facilities”.

47% of the respondents disagreed, in an interviewer-led survey which the council repeatedly said would accurately represent the views of the whole city. More than half of those who voluntarily completed the online version of the survey also disagreed.

The council claims it is committed to taking public consultation results into account when making decisions, and explaining how it has done so when those decisions are made.

Its external auditor has taken it to task for failing to hold public consultations on the past three years’ budgets, but having consulted on its 2025-26 budget the council has failed to explain how the results were taken into account in making the cuts.

At the same time, figures acquired under accounts inspection legislation show that the council’s flagship St Sidwell’s Point leisure centre depends on much larger subsidies than Northbrook pool, which requires the smallest input among all six of its leisure services sites.

In 2022-23, the council subsidised St Sidwell’s Point to the tune of £1.2 million but Northbrook cost it just £169,000 as part of an overall leisure services subsidy of £3.3 million. In 2023-24 St Sidwell’s Point cost £900,000 and Northbrook £187,000 while the whole service subsidy came to £2.4 million.

These figures, which the council compiled by allocating income to each leisure centre according to the primary centre specified on each leisure services membership application, do not include the capital costs of ongoing equipment replacement or building works.

Its leisure centre capital programme came to £465,000 in 2023-24, which rose to £2.25 million in 2024-25 and is set at £1.75 million in 2025-26. St Sidwell’s Point gets the lion’s share in all three years.

These figures also do not include cost of servicing council debt related to the construction of St Sidwell’s Point, which took nearly ten years to complete and eventually cost £45 million, more than twice its original £19.4 million budget.

The council borrowed £36 million towards its construction costs from the Public Works Loan Board in September 2019 on a 50 year annuity basis, of which £33.7 million remained outstanding at the end of last year. It pays a fixed 1.8% interest rate on the loan, equating to just over £600,000 this year.

Extract from What makes St Sidwell’s Point such an asset. Source: Exeter Labour Party.

Exeter City Council has been considering the closure of Northbrook for more than two years, after taking Exeter Leisure services back in-house – hoping to break even – then realising that they were likely remain permanently loss-making instead.

Responsibility for their delivery was transferred from Parkwood Leisure to the council in September 2020 as the first summer of pandemic lockdowns eased.

It didn’t begin to reopen leisure facilities until April the following year, and by the time the final lockdown ended in July, at the same time as the Riverside Leisure Centre re-opened following a fire four years earlier, a third of the pre-pandemic Exeter Leisure membership base had been lost.

St Sidwell’s Point pre-opening membership promotion helped offset the losses, however. Within a month of the new centre opening in April 2022 membership numbers had returned to pre-pandemic levels. By March the following year, ahead of target, Exeter Leisure memberships had doubled to 10,000, 7.6% of the city’s population.

But the council had already reduced Northbrook pool opening hours after many of its university student lifeguards had gone home the previous summer, and Josie Parkhouse, then the councillor responsible for leisure services, admitted that ongoing lifeguard shortages were resulting in closures at pools that were not busy, such as Northbrook, in favour of St Sidwell’s Point.

Adding that Northbrook’s opening hours would shortly change again, she also said that the exodus of university students each summer meant leisure membership numbers fell then too.

In April 2023 a report from council finance director Dave Hodgson concluded that, despite the council’s original intention to “work towards” a cost-neutral leisure service, a “detailed analysis and review of the service has identified that this will not be possible”.

It added that officers were “focussing on work to control costs with a view to potentially identifying if or when a cost-neutral position can be met”.

Another report said the council’s wider financial position meant that the £3.6 million subsidy – £1 million more than budgeted – with which it had propped up its leisure services in 2022-23 had to be halved to £1.8 million.

All the council leisure centres were expected to continue to require subsidies, with the possible exception of St Sidwell’s Point which, according to a follow-up finance report, had “the potential to become cost neutral at year five”.

The council increased leisure membership fees, cut staff, closed the St Sidwell’s Point crèche and reduced centre opening times. Other services were reduced or removed entirely. Membership numbers fell, and still hadn’t recovered a year later.

Meanwhile the council unsuccessfully applied to Sport England for Northbrook pool funding. Duncan Wood, who was by then the councillor responsible for leisure services, told a council scrutiny committee that while the pool had “seen an increase in numbers”, they were “nowhere near what would be needed for the centre to become financially viable”.

He added that council leisure services were heavily dependent on students who weren’t here during the summer when demand increased, and that high staff turnover was causing training delays.

After extolling the high footfall and membership numbers at St Sidwell’s Point, and saying that Northbrook cost a lot to run, he was asked to explain St Sidwell’s Point’s £1.2 million 2022-23 service provision subsidy.

His response was that the council was facing service-wide challenges and had to look at leisure services as a whole.

By this time last year the council was planning more leisure services cuts, although it didn’t say where they would fall.

A council officer told a June scrutiny committee that it had reduced the leisure services subsidy to £1.1 million – although this figure excluded £1.3 million in depreciation of which St Sidwell’s Point accounted for half.

The officer also said the council was “seeing a significant increase in repairs and maintenance costs, meaning our gains in income are coming short of our building upkeep costs and not contributing towards the subsidy”.

Adding that the council was still aiming for cost-neutrality, although it did not have a target date, the officer said that its ageing facilities were creating challenges, that Northbrook was very expensive to run, and that councillors would soon have to decide whether to keep it open.

They were also told that St Sidwell’s Point was so busy that it was experiencing capacity issues and equipment required continuous rolling replacement, and that while membership rates were falling as huge numbers of students left for the summer, they would rise again on their return.

Sure enough, in October the council finance director said that all its leisure centres were again operating at maximum capacity, although it was still having trouble with staff turnover.

Last month, at the same meeting at which the council set its 2025-26 budget, it confirmed that it was expecting to end 2024-25 having achieved the £1.8 million leisure services subsidy target it set two years ago – although this was partly because of a one-off repayment of £646,560 from HMRC following its March 2023 decision to change the way VAT is applied to leisure services income.

But an updated council risk register that was published two weeks later, on the same day the Northbrook pool consultation opened, nevertheless still said that leisure centres were at risk of closure and that a “further review” of leisure “operating models” would take place during 2025.

The Northbrook pool consultation runs until 22 April. Four focus groups, each limited to twelve participants, will also be held next week. All are now full, but the council says it will arrange telephone interviews on request with those who have not secured a place.

The community petition to prevent the closure of the pool is still going strong.

The council says it will publish its pool closure survey “findings” by 15 July and that a “full analysis of the impacts will take place before any decision is made”.