Save Swimming in Enfield
The London Borough of Enfield has four competitive swimming clubs that have, for many years, been operating their own highly successful learn-to-swim programmes attracting children of different backgrounds from across the community. The programmes have taught young children very quickly and very effectively the life-saving skill of swimming and allowed all those keen to continue to progress within a competitive squad and succeed in the sport. In addition to the competitive squads, there are also highly successful Club Squad programmes for all those who enjoy swimming regularly for fitness without the pressure of competing.
This year alone, the Borough has produced four swimmers who competed at the ASA National Championships (all four of whom have been asked to join the ASA England Talent Programme) and numerous further talented athletes who have been extremely successful at Regional and County levels. The Borough Squads have very successfully competed at London Youth Games, with the Aquathlon Team winning Silver in 2011, and the Mini Games Swimmers even winning Gold in 2010 (beating 32 other boroughs). All of these are success stories that help put Enfield on the map in a positive way and are important to counter-balance recent negative press.
The clubs are non-profit organisations, and what makes them so successful is a large team of highly committed volunteers who invest many, many hours of their personal time and skills to help the children of Enfield make constructive use of their leisure time in a safe and happy club environment.
Unfortunately, the future of competitive swimming in the Borough has now come under threat.
Enfield Council recently contracted Fusion Lifestyle to manage Enfield leisure services. As part of their efforts to streamline services to the people of Enfield, the company’s strategy is to take over all learn-to-swim programmes at Council pools, thereby creating a monopoly situation. Not only does this fail to produce talent to feed through to the competitive squads (very rarely have we had competent swimmers from Borough programmes join our squads), but it will also seriously compromise the financial viability of the clubs who greatly depend on the income from the teaching programmes. Although Fusion Lifestyle have offered some sort of possible financial support to the clubs, they are unwilling to propose a more detailed financial plan and have refused any further discussions with regard to issues such as water time for the clubs in the immediate future. Support “for the first two years†was mentioned – Fusion are contracted for another 19 years!
Fusion Lifestyle are effectively attempting to create a monopoly situation in a domain in which they have no particular expertise, when there are expert non-profit organisations with years of experience, large bands of skilled volunteers and young people with bags of enthusiasm that are more competent in every aspect of the matter.
Our petition can be found and signed here:
http://governance.enfield.gov.uk/mgEPetitionDisplay.aspx?ID=16&RPID=18234460
