Item 6 (Minute 22) and Item 7 (minute 23) were taken together.

Cllr Smith, Board Member for Leisure, Parks and Sport introduced the reports and said that they contained some very positive headlines, such as a 71% increase in visits to leisure centres since the contract commenced and the expected achievement of a zero subsidy per user in 2017/18. 

The Head of Community Services added that in 2008 the Council was spending £2M per year on subsidising visits to leisure centres and next year this would reduce to zero.

Cllr Fry raised concerns about how quickly minor maintenance requests and IT failures were dealt with and questioned whether these issues were considered in performance assessments.  The Head of Community Services said that Fusion used a variety of assessments including mystery visits and customer journey mapping.  He could not excuse failures to fix minor maintenance issues but was not aware of any continuous problems, and such issues should be seen in the context of a vast increase in usage over recent years.

In response to a question about tracking the numbers of individuals visiting leisure centres rather than the total number of visits, Cllr Smith explained that there were lots of casual users.  She wanted these users to buy into the loyalty schemes and these needed to be promoted more.

Cllr Fry asked what user involvement there was on the Leisure Partnership Board and commented that a user representative had been unable to attend recent meetings because they had taken place in the daytime on a week day.  The Board meets quarterly and its minutes are published on the Council website.  The membership included two elected members as well as customer representatives including older and younger people.  The Committee suggest that the Council should look to strengthen user representation on the Board to provide useful consumer opinion on matters before the Board, and if necessary, the meeting times should be changed to facilitate this.

The Committee noted that Ferry Leisure Centre had a user group in place and suggest that the Council should encourage the formation of user groups at leisure centres that don’t already have them, targeting regular customers if possible.  The Committee commented that each user group could have a representative on the Leisure Partnership Board, which would help to strengthen user representation.

The Committee queried annual reductions in swimming visits by people under the age of 17 (from 48,400 in 2014/15 to 45,200 in 2015/16) and by people over the age of 60 (from 33,000 to 22,600) and asked what the explanations were.  Work is taking place nationally to address a decline in swimming and officers wanted to address the reductions by attracting new swimmers, particularly amongst older people.  The Committee noted that the Service Plan included a target to deliver a 3% year-on-year increase in over 60 swimming.  The Committee suggest that, given the 32% drop in over 60 swimming in 2015/16, Fusion should be challenged to deliver a higher increase in 2016/17.

Cllr Tidball asked whether  ...  view the full minutes text for item 22