Wandsworth Council has new gyms to show off at two of its leisure centres. But it still won’t tell residents what is going on at Putney Leisure Centre.
The good news first, because it is good news: Roehampton Sports and Fitness Centre on the Alton Estate has a completely refurbished fitness suite: new machines throughout, the rooms redecorated and the air-handling improved, so it is a brighter place to train.
Across the borough at Wandle Recreation Centre on Mapleton Road, the gym has been rebuilt around people who normally avoid gyms. The new resistance machines run on air rather than stacked weights, which makes them easier on joints for beginners, older residents and anyone nursing an injury or a long-term condition. There is technology to build a personal workout and track it over time, and the gym now sits inside what the council calls a wellbeing hub, where GPs and others can send people to an activity rather than a prescription.
Both are open now. The council announced them on Thursday.
“Whether you’re taking your first steps into fitness or training regularly, these upgraded spaces will help more people move more and feel better,” said Councillor Ethan Brooks, the cabinet member for environment.
The two refits are part of a £24m programme the council is running with Places Leisure, the company that took over all eight of the borough’s leisure centres on a ten-year contract last October. Battersea and Latchmere were done earlier this year.
Putney Leisure Centre is on a different track however: its £3.85m green refit, paid for out of a separate government decarbonisation fund, is still running months behind; as of last month the council was still tendering for the work, four months after its own deadline to place the orders. The same leisure contract was approved alongside a legal dispute it did not disclose at the time.
So the council can tell you, in some detail, what it has spent on leisure. What it will not tell you is what it claims to have saved through a new 10-year contract.
In March, every household in the borough got a leaflet with its council tax bill. Among the reasons it gave for keeping bills low was this line: “We’ve saved £30m on a new leisure centre contract over ten years.” That saving was printed in the council tax leaflet sent to 159,000 homes.
Putney.news asked the council to show the workings. In August the council said the figure was confidential: the numbers came from Places Leisure, it said, and releasing them would break a confidence. So the figure is public enough for a leaflet through every door, and private enough that nobody may see how it was reached.
How long the answer took
The law gives a council 20 working days to answer a request for information. This one was logged on 16 March. The answer came on 5 August. That is 98 working days, 78 of them after the legal limit had passed.
In May, with the deadline five weeks gone, we formally asked the council to review its own handling of the request. The council did not treat that as a request for a review at all; so in June the request was added to six others where the council had either failed to answer or failed to review, and the whole set went to the Information Commissioner as a single complaint about how Wandsworth handles these requests. Several weeks after that complaint was filed and reported, the refusal arrived.
What happens now
A second request for a review went in on Saturday 29 August. This time the council accepted it. Yesterday, its FOI officer wrote to us explaining “we will consider this as a request for Internal Review. We aim to respond to you within a further 20 working days.”
And so by the end of the month, we should find out whether the leaflets it printed and delivered to every home in Wandsworth can be trusted or not. If the review upholds the refusal, we will go back to the Information Commissioner, where it already sits with several other cases.
The new gym at Roehampton is a real improvement for the Alton, and the one at Wandle has been built with some care for the people leisure centres usually miss. We’ll see how Putney turns out.
