Star comment: What will happen to centres?
Two years ago a private firm, Serco, was brought in by Shropshire Council to run five leisure centres in the county.
The deal looked attractive on the face of it. It would mean the council would get a divorce from a significant drain on its finances, and there was talk that the change would result in new investment in those centres – the Quarry Leisure Centre and Sports Village in Shrewsbury, the new Oswestry Leisure Centre, and centres in Market Drayton and Whitchurch.
Now, only two years into a contract that was supposed to run for 10 years, Serco is looking to sell the business that runs those five centres.
If the idea of this deal was to ensure stability and continuity for the next decade it has spectacularly failed. The prospect now is a new buyer coming in, if one can be found of course, with all the uncertainty that means for the staff and members of the public who use these centres.
Serco is hoping to sell its environmental and leisure businesses, and it says despite the sale the leisure side is considered to be a strong business.
What has happened is council-run services have been privatised, and have come up against the potential consequences of opening up these things to the often unpredictable and challenging world of business and commerce.
It is a world of hard and tough-headed decision-making.
Many questions arise from this troubling development. The central one is the simple one: what will happen now?
If the running of the centres is successfully sold, what will be the practical effect for all those who use them? Was there anything in the deal to stop a sell-off after only two years, and if there was not, what is to stop it happening again?
Running them costs money, but there again one of the themes of the modern age is that we all have a responsibility, bordering on a patriotic duty, to ensure we are as fit as we can be and so are not any more of a burden on the National Health Service than we need to be.
The Serco experience has the stamp of an arrangement which looked good to those who tied all the pieces together, but which has had unexpected consequences. Maybe all will turn out for the best.
One way or the other, Shropshire Council is going to learn something from what has happened.
