Gateshead leisure centres promised big investment as council hands facilities to new operator

A new operator that will take control of a series of leisure centres in Gateshead has promised “significant investment” to improve the facilities.

On Tuesday morning, Gateshead Council agreed to appoint Greenwich Leisure Limited (GLL) to run its centres in Heworth, Dunston, Blaydon, and Gateshead International Stadium from April 2025. A signing of the 10-year deal, with an option to extend for a further five, marks the conclusion of a controversial reshaping of the town’s leisure services.

Gateshead Leisure Centre and Birtley Pool were both closed down by the council due to budget cuts last year, though both have since reopened under community ownership, with the cash-strapped local authority saying it could not keep running the facilities as it faces up to a £34.4 million deficit up to 2030. But the Labour-controlled authority’s cabinet was told on Tuesday that GLL would be making a raft of refurbishments once it takes over the remaining sites – including new gym equipment and floors, replacement of the FlowRider at Heworth with a new water slide, LED lighting, and a soft play area at the International Stadium.

Tim Bestford, GLL’s head of service in the North, told the Local Democracy Reporting Service (LDRS) that the not-for-profit enterprise wanted to make the most out of “iconic” facilities, including helping every child in Gateshead learn to swim, and that it wanted to be “as proactive and ambitious” as possible as it invests a “significant sum” into the assets.

He added: “The facilities are in really good nick. The stock is good, what needs to happen is we need to activate more. We need to be going out into communities and getting them to come and use the facilities. If we get more users through the door then, without a doubt, we are going to make this work – and, more importantly, we are going to improve the health and wellbeing of Gateshead residents.”

GLL operates more than 240 leisure centres nationwide and is behind the Better group of facilities, including a number of centres in Newcastle. Council leader Martin Gannon said that residents could be "absolutely 100 per cent” confident that the future of their local leisure centre was now secure.

The long-serving Labour councillor told colleagues that there was a “negative side to outsourcing”, highlighting criticisms of Kensington and Chelsea Council in the wake of the Grenfell disaster and the importance of Gateshead’s leisure centre staff who were deployed to other frontline posts during the Covid pandemic, but admitted that the council had failed in a drive since 2016 to make its leisure centres profitable.

He added: “Of course we would prefer to run these services ourselves. However, the most important thing is ensuring those services are there for the people of Gateshead. This puts us in a position where Gateshead Council is working in partnership with a world class organisation that has an absolute track record of delivery, not just in maintaining services but enhancing them and investing in the facilities. We have absolute assurances in terms of the future of those services, not just as they are today but that they will grow and enhance.”

GLL previously came under fire in Newcastle for the closure of the old West Denton Pool, which never reopened after the Covid pandemic and is now due to be replaced by a state-of-the-art facility which is yet to be built. Mr Bestford insisted that Gateshead’s centres were “completely different” and would not be under the same threat.

He told the LDRS: “These are some of the best maintained facilities I have seen, so credit to the staff for doing that. The situation in Newcastle was very different – we were talking about a 50-year-old pool that had obviously seen better days. We then had Covid, which put a huge amount of pressure on, and then the utility crisis – we closed it before the utility crisis and if we hadn’t it would probably have been double the amount of cost.”

At Tuesday’s cabinet meeting, Lib Dem opposition leader Ron Beadle asked if the council had fully examined the history of the operator and was confident in its ability to deliver on its promises – following concerns about some outsourced public services being brought back in-house, most recently the decision to cut off funding to the charity set up to run Newcastle’s parks. He was told that the council had done a “huge amount of research”, with Labour cabinet member Angela Douglas adding that she was “100% confident” in officers’ due diligence.

Gateshead is relatively late in handing over control of its leisure centres to an outside firm compared to a couple of neighbours – with GLL having run services in Newcastle since 2016 and Everyone Active in Sunderland since 2015. Asked by the LDRS if the council should have taken the decision years ago, Coun Gannon said: “We are where we are and, because of the extreme pressures in terms of finances, we have no option but to go down this track.

"On that basis, I suppose if we had done it 10 years earlier we would be in a better place now. But we were not to anticipate the severity of the financial pressures we would come under. I think we did do the right thing in 2016, in the circumstances and the outlook we had.”

GLL will also run tennis courts in Derwent, Chopwell and Marley Hill parks, and also deliver a physical activity programme that includes targeted sessions in community settings.

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