Letter Published in Echo Today ‘Investment’ will just result in leisure cuts We felt we had to write to say how surprised and disappointed we are that the Echo did not report the recent protest about cuts in leisure services in the Splott, Tremorfa, Adamsdown and Roath (STAR) areas. This was held on August 2 outside the Star Centre where two Labour councillors were holding a surgery, and where at least 60 residents voiced their anger at 9.30am on a rainy Saturday morning. We are angry because we have been misled by the council about their plans to “invest” in our leisure services. This investment is, in reality, a massive cut, and the “delight” expressed by our three Splott ward councillors in the letters page of the Echo does nothing to persuade us otherwise. The original plan to build a £9m leisure hub to replace soon-to-be-demolished Splott Pool and the Star Centre, has been downgraded, without any consultation with the local community, to a proposal to construct a smaller, and less well-equipped, “mini” hub. This new proposal would not include a sports hall, a central element of any decent leisure centre, and would, in effect, mean the loss to the community of many sports such as badminton, five-a-side football, volleyball, trampolining, etc, as well as children’s play facilities. All this in an area which already suffers extreme social deprivation. We feel we have been betrayed by the council so often that they can no longer be trusted, and anything they say has to be treated with a good dose of scepticism. Their original promise, made at a packed residents’ meeting last year, of new “state of the art” leisure facilities for this area, has now been replaced by plans for this new hub which will largely consist of advice service offices and a basic pool. Promises of diving boards, flumes and bowling alleys have been abandoned, as has the pledge by councillors that Splott Pool would not be closed until “spades are in the ground”. At the recent councillors’ surgery we were promised that everything possible would be done to put the planned, imminent, demolition of Splott Pool on hold until a meeting between council leader Phil Bale and members of Save Splott Pool (local residents) is held. It remains to be seen whether this will be just another broken promise. Stephen and Judith Willcox Splott, Cardiff
Posted on: Fri, 15 Aug 2014 20:07:49 +0000
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