Thank you, Madam Mayor
Purley town centre, serves as a hub to the south of the Borough - around a quarter of the Borough’s population.
Why is it so important that Purley has a leisure centre?
Mrs Paul told us of schools’ statutory duty to ensure that pupils learn to swim: Every 11-year old should leave primary school able to swim. Public swimming pools are vital in helping schools to meet that requirement and at least 10 schools use Purley Pool regularly. It is impossible to argue against the need to ensure that children know how to stay alive should they fall into a body of water. If you close the local pool, you close down that opportunity to keep our children safe. We need the pool to be reopened.
We all need to stay fit and active for our physical and mental wellbeing. Purley Leisure Centre offers that provision in an easily accessible location. But many residents cannot do any weight bearing exercise - swimming is the only physical activity they can do.
For example, The Enterprise Swimming Club has provided swimming activities for disabled people at Purley since 1982. Their members have had 9 long months in which some of them have been unable to do any exercise at all and the Council is unwilling to discuss with them what can be done to find another venue. This brings shame on our Council. If you won’t provide an alternative venue for the Club, we need to have Purley Pool reopened.
Added to this, the Leisure Centre brings people into the Town Centre who go on to visit the shops and cafes. If we are to keep our town centre alive, we have to bring more people in rather than leave buildings empty.
Cllr Lewis’s standard response is that there is capacity at Waddon or New Addington Pools. But he knows that for many in Sanderstead, Kenley or Coulsdon this means 2 or 3 buses making a round trip of up to 2.5 hours – or 3.5 hours including the actual swim. Who has time for that? Certainly not full-time workers or teachers trying to shepherd a class of 30. We should be making exercise easier not harder.
And we know by looking at the other Centres run by GLL that no other London Borough has found it so difficult to reopen a specific centre. This is because the Purley Centre is uniquely underfunded – you have had 6 years to make the investment. Labour may have spent all of the money but you don’t seem to have bothered to seek alternative funding streams, such as the £250M of funds released by Sport England each year. Why not?
Cllr Lewis has teased us with the idea of a new pool in the south of the Borough but we need to see full planning approval and ring-fenced funding in place before the wider Purley community can countenance the closure of the existing centre. Otherwise it is just words.
The majority of members at this meeting were at the January 2015 Full Council that heard similar speeches being made to keep Purley Pool open AND to ensure investment to maintain future use. Council unanimously voted to keep the Pool open on those terms. Let’s not renege on that. I support this petition.
