'Medway Council Fail to Share their Working on Children’s Free Swimming' - say the Lib Dems
The Medway Liberal Democrats are disappointed that Medway Council has failed to give any details on how they calculated the potential savings from cancelling free swimming in Medway. Despite promising to share their calculations, they have not specified what level of revenue loss they factored in due to people no longer attending, and it is not clear whether they considered the numbers of full ticket-paying parents who would no longer attend now that their children cannot swim for free. We are concerned that saving a small amount of money will stop a larger sum of money being spent at our leisure centres.
This information came to light during our sustained campaign to reverse the Medway Labour Group’s decision to end free swimming in Medway. We attended a council meeting the 26th March, 2024, to discuss our petition to save free child swimming and were promised the calculations and assumptions made by council officers when they made their decision. After repeatedly chasing for this information, we finally received an answer on 14th June. But it did not contain the clear answer we were promised.
Their response said, ‘Financial analysis was based on assessing the number of free swim sessions booked in the past financial year and estimating the likely number of paid sessions which would be undertaken in the current financial year.’
With no details about what these estimates are and whether they factored in any loss of revenue from a drop in attendance. It seems Medway Council just want us to trust that they made all the correct assumptions and got all the maths correct. Yet any student knows that unless you show your working, you don’t get full marks.
Stuart Bourne, Medway Lib Dem spokesperson, says, ‘When the Labour Party came to power in Medway last year, they promised an open and transparent administration. Yet they appear to be just as bad as the previous Tory administration, always trying to hide how their decisions are made. On such an important subject as free swimming, the people of Medway deserve to know the exact details, so that they can trust that the council made a correct decision.’
Medway Liberal Democrats are calling upon Medway Council to release the exact calculations and assumptions that were made when determining the cost saving of ending free swimming, and to make it clear whether they factored in any loss of attendance due to the changes. Only then can the people of Medway know that their council did not rush into this poor decision and truly considered its impact on council finances.
ENDS