Jim Mather managed the all-but-impossible, chairing last night’s meeting (15th January) on the Mid Argyll Swimming Pool. With no obvious hands on the wheel, he steered what could have been an angry confrontation towards a collective and constructive exploration of the situation and the contributions that could be brought to bear upon it.
Following a summary of the situation from Board members Jenny Davies and Stephen Whiston (Chair), pictured below, the context of the discussion was a consensus that it should leave history out of the reckoning, focusing on the current reality and positive actions to secure the future of the Pool.
Analysis of how Jim Mather works this alchemy will be part of a profile feature on Argyll’s MSP which is currently in preparation. For now, let’s start from this context of a shared and positive brainstorming session and identify some of the critical insights, key actions, potential developments and offers of help which emerged.
Warning: this does not mean that the future of the Pool is anything like secure but it has unequivocally isolated the key actions that will be needed and the range of initiatives that can then come forwards to lift the facility into attracting funding and into trading its way to survival.
Contributors to the session
Those present included representatives from the Board of the Pool; Argyll and Bute Council, including Sports Strategy; Highlands and Islands Enterprise; Argyll & Bute Social Enterprise Network; Argyll & Bute Community Planning Partnership; Stathclyde Community Police service; the Mid Argyll Rotary Club; and Atlantis Leisure from Oban.
Individuals present included Alan Reid, Argyll’s Westminster MP; Mike Mackenzie, the SNP Westminster candidate for the seat at the forthcoming General Election; the two male of the three Mid Argyll Councillors; a doctor from the local NHS Highland service (and the complete spectrum of health professionals strongly support the continuing provision of the pool); users of the pool concerned for its survival; and reporters from the Oban Times group and from For Argyll.
Key immediate issues
- Timeframe – the situation is time-critical. There is not the luxury of prolonged discussions and negotiations before the key block to survival is unlocked. The energetic currrent Board – all volunteers – are running the pool themselves as well as performing the range of Board activities necessary in a crisis – like preparing a business plan and working on funding applications – as well as doing their own day jobs. They are close to exhaustion and admit to stress.
- Intervention – this relates to unlocking the key obstruction to survival: the company’s deficit. This relatively modest deficit condemns the pool to a Catch-22 dilemma. Bodies like Highlands and Islands Enterprise are legally unable to provide funding to a company in deficit. HIE – and others – want to help and are are poised to do so when that deficit is removed. Until then, they can offer only time and advice – which is helpful but not the greatest immediate need which is money for maintenance and staffing.
- Facility Manager – whatever the remaining legal issues around the long term absence of the manager, these must be swiftly brought to a conclusion. In the greater interests of the community at large, it may need concessions from both sides to achieve this. Securing funding to appoint the right person on the right package is mission critical – and that incorporates three quite separate challenges.
- Target deadlines – with intervention in place, dates should be set by which the pool will achieve a strategic sequence of prioritised targets towards its long term survival.
With the best will in the world – which exists in and around all concerned with the facility – nothing can come into play until its deficit is lifted. The current Board raised the extraordinary amount of over £25,000 earlier this year from the small local community and its businessfolk. This paid off a debt inherited from the collapsed previous regime and enabled credit to be restored. In turn this made it possible for the facility to limp on, with its staff paid the minimum wage that is all they have ever had in recognition of the committed service they provide.
The Board simply cannot go back to the community so soon to ask for more. Intervention will have to come from public sector sources and it became clear at the meeting that this is squarely on the immediate agenda of the Community Planning Partnership (CPP). This body brings together all the relevant authorities and bodies – from the Council to the voluntary sector – collectively charged, in the very nature of their partnership, with the community planning that must address situations like this.
The centrality of Argyll’s Community Planning Partnership
The effectiveness of this body cannot be taken for granted. There is a gap between appearance and reality, driven by sheer pressure of work.
The reality is that few CPP meetings see anything like all ofthe relevant corporate members represented – and at a level where commitments can be made.
The situation at the Mid Argyll Pool – a critical community resource – is so fragile that it cannot be left to chance that a CPP meeting to address the situation turns out to be able to do so effectively.
The presence of appropriate senior management of its key players – with the authority to commit – will have to be recruited and assured in advance of an early meeting to arrange the level and sourcing of the financial intervention without which this facility will certainly close.
The necessary intervention
The amount of the intervention will have to clear the deficit – and that will have to include the amount of the advance payments of revenue grants given by Argyll and Bute Council to the Board to keep the facility on tickover. ‘Tick’ is the relevant engine in this word and clarifies why such payments must be added as part of the actual deficit of the company.
Above that, an adequate amount of money must be made immediately available for specific repair and maintenace. The new Board has, responsibly, focused what hand-to-mouth resources it has had on keeping the pool area itself in good order. But there has not been the money to address issues outside the pool area – like missing tiles.
If the building itself, inside and out, with the approaches to the pool area and the other facilities, does not look attractive and cared for, all of the initiatives planned to attract and build new business will fail.
Key facts
- Swimming pools are vastly expensive to run and cannot generate income to support their operation without public sector subsidy. The notably resourceful Atlantis Leisure in Oban generates income at the door of around £450,000 per annum but still needs Council subsidy of £350-360,000 per annum to sustain its operations. The wonderfully imaginative Council-run facility of Aqualibrium in Campbeltown loses around £500,000 pa.
- The availability of swimming pools with leisure and sports facilities or activities are key drivers of decisions by holiday visitors on where to come.
- The physical and mental health benefit of the provision of a swimming pool has no value put upon it.
- The social benefit arising from the provision of a swimming pool – to community and peer group cohesion and to the opportunity to participate in other sports for which the ability to swim is a prerequisite – has no value put upon it.
Contextually supportive events
- Argyll & Bute Council is to hold a Best Value Review of Argyll’s pools in the immediate future. It was recognised to be important that issues around best practice would be part of such a review. The overall outcomes of the Best Value Review will, of course, impact on budget allocations.
- Argyll & Bute Social Enterprise Network (ABSEN) is running a conference in Oban in March (date to be advised) which will focus on the challenges to social enterprises running pools and leisure centres.
Potential developments
- The owners of the land on which the Pool stands – Argyll’s major business, the construction firm, M&K MacLeod – might consider the gift of that land to the Pool. Ownership would not only improve the Board’s capacity to attract funding to support the facility but the gift could be considered for match funding from appropriate sources.
- Since swimming pools cannot cover their operating costs in revenue generated, it would make sense to look at acquiring a revenue generating asset – such as a wind turbine.
- Resource sharing between, at least, Atlantis in Oban and the Mid Argyll Pool has real attractions for both. Atlantis currently has a demand for pool time for training sessions for talented young competitive swimmers that it cannot meet without extraordinary provision like opening at 6.00am. If less used times were identified at the Mid Argyll Pool, these could be dedicated to training times for the Oban group. Special pool activity equipment might also be shared between the two – and other, pools. It would be geographically and economically sensible for the Campbeltown pool to be part of such a consortium.
- Aspects of the organisation employed at Atlantis Leisure might be adopted as a model for the Mid Argyll Pool’s operation. For example, Atlantis divides itself into one body that looks after the facility and one that delivers sporting services. It also divides its Board functions into tasked sub-groups, led by Board members but including community members with specific expertise to bring to bear. Many non-Board members of such sub-groups go on to become full members of the Atlantis Board, maintaining a flow of new energy and a spectrum of expertise.
- Uninvoiced specialist services provided free to support the survival of the pool by local businesses and individuals in maintenance, repair and plumbing etc should appear, costed, in the accounts and be used in match funding applications.
Potential business development strategies
- Compile a local Asset Register of people with skills and qualifications they are willing to contribute in taking sessions at the Pool facility – like snorkelling, aqualung and activity leadership – and establish the insurance position for such developments.
- Compile a parallel Register of local training needs – group and individual, competitive and personal.
- Develop good access from the Pool to the Crinan Canal towpath opposite and develop ‘Green Gym’ activities – walking, running, cycling – which then make use of the Pool’s showers as part of the experience.
- Mobilise Board members and Pool staff to recruit groups to use the pool.
- Explore staff secondment from other pools – like Atlantis – to develop the enterprise gene pool and recruit involvement from independent sports service businesses like Face West Fitness .
- Open discussions with local GP practices to explore the possibility for patient referrals on health and fitness programmes as opposed to the more usual chemical interventions prescribed.
- Explore day activity packages for holiday periods, marketed to local residents and visitors alike. For example, this could be swimming, walking and beaver watching.
Immediate offers of assistance
- The Rotary Club offered help with fund raising and suggested that Round Table involvement would also be valuable – both organisations having long experience in fund raising activities.
- Dave Payne – the organiser of the hugely successful Save Our Pool community rally on 19th December and a man with very real skills and abilities to contribute, offered to join the Board as Events Coordinator and commit two days a week in this capacity.
- For Argyll offered a free banner advertisement on its front page to complement running coverage of activities and achievements by the Board and the pool. HIE suggested that the Board might consider targeting this advertisement on attracting group usage of the facility.
The bottom line
The bottom line in sport and leisure facility provision of this and all kinds is that that it is not about money. This provision at heart is about supporting a healthy, active and cohesive community, equipped to take advantage of living in Argyll.
It is also about providing resources attractive to potential visitors to the area. This is a considerably persuasive element in making the choice of where to go within the UK, given the unpredictability of the weather. It is particularly attractive to families. For this reason, such facilities require to be part of all local marketing strategies.
It is right that public subsidy – from tax revenues – should contribute to this provision. It is equally right that communities accept that such a resource requires community support of all kinds if it is to be able to continue to serve local needs.
Argyll and Bute Council deserves recognition for both courage and imagination in the development of Council run resources in this field.
Atlantis Leisure in Oban pay tribute to the Council’s courage in entering into the hybrid operation which sees that facility deliver sports services so strongly for its community.
The Council is equally deserving of praise for the vision and investment it put into the creation of Aqualibrium on the loch front at Campbeltown. This facility should be a major USP in the marketing of Kintyre. If there is a pool anywhere in the UK with a more spectacular view, we’d like to know about it. Take it from us, if you haven’t seen it – it is unimaginably breathtaking. But check it out for yourselves.
The end of the meeting
There was no ending as such. The session was brought formally to a close but the constructive energies and the spirit of collective involvement it had generated meant that people stayed on, talking in small and mobile groups, still knocking ideas around, still thinking of things they could do.
The challenge now is of making all of this stick – of not letting it dissipate but of channelling it into concrete action.
This model, Jim Mather’s preferred modus operandi in problem solving – could be very usefully employed now in approaching the need to retain Castle Toward in Cowal as Argyll’s only outdoor and potentially quite wonderful, education centre.
Next
In channelling the outcomes of this meeting into concrete action, the Board of the Pool continue to be the driver of the situation and we suggest that their first task is to liaise with the Community Planning Partnership, make sure that the matter of financial intervention in the pool’s sitution is an emergency item on the agenda of the next meeting – and mobilise the CPP administration to recruit empowered representatives from the partners to be present for that item. Time is critical.
Update 18th January: Jim Mather’s response to mthe session was: ‘I feel that we made a good deal of progress at the meeting, agreeing actions in how we can give wider support to the pool facility.
‘Those present got a far better understanding of the underlying problems faced by the pool and the Community Planning Partnership will have a far more comprehensive picture of the potential that exists within the Mid Argyll area to build on the present momentum for future stability.
‘There was also valuable input from elsewhere present and lessons to be learned from the experience of others.
‘It is my hope that the cooperation and collaboration that was evident will be what is needed to help the pool back to a sustainable basis and one that will greatly benefit the community in the future.
‘This is primarily a community project and I am encouraged to see the extent of community involvement in taking it forward’.
The Board of the Mid Argyll Swimming Pool was awarded the first For Argyll award in the recent For Argyll Awards 2009, in recognition of the example it has set Argyll in mobilising community energies behind community resources.
The Board is still looking for people to offer to join, bringing specific skills and expertise to the communal effort. If you can help, please email its Chair, Stephen Whiston: stephen.whiston@btinternet.com
The photographs accompanying this article are by copyright holder, Rebecca Martin and may not be reproduced without permission.