Will youngsters' plea save leisure centre?

7:23pm Friday 2nd March 2007

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IF these happy, hope-filled faces cannot persuade a council to keep a leisure centre open, then what on earth will?

That might have been one of the questions going through the minds of members of Keep Leisure in Cricklade (Klic) yesterday.

Hundreds of children from St Sampson's Junior School walked from their classrooms with teachers to form a ring around the centre, which they use for school-time swimming lessons and for all sorts of other activities in their free time.

As they arrived they chanted and shouted their pleas for North Wilts District Council to take note and not to close their beloved leisure centre down.

They would be among the first to suffer if the building and all its facilities were to close down.

It was not the first time Cricklade had seen this out-pouring of emotion in recent months but with just a just a few days to go until the members of Klic find out whether or not they will be allowed to take over the running of the centre, it was time for one big final push to get the message out.

Gary Walker, chairman of Klic said that their organisation had been encouraged by meetings with the council held earlier this week.

He said: "We believe we are close to a deal.

"Until recently it felt as if the council just wanted to close the facility and be done with it, but now there is a hint that they do want to save it.

"We are planning at the moment to be in a position to take over the leisure centre on April 1, but we will have our work cut out for us.

"Up until last year the council was putting in £168,000 per year. We are asking for just £70,000, and if they can't do that then 18 people will lose their liveli-hoods.

"What we are asking for is the support from them because we do care about what we are doing," he added.

Andrew Henstridge, head of St Sampson's, said that the loss of the leisure centre would affect the education of its children.

He said: "At the moment the children can simply walk from the school to the leisure centre, do their swimming lessons and walk back.

"If it closes we face having to put the children on a bus to either Malmesbury or Ciren-cester so rather than an hour an half for a swimming lesson, they will have lost an entire morning which means they will be missing out on educational experiences."

The children and residents were joined by North Wiltshire MP James Gray, who after chairing the committee that helped to save the Lime Kiln leisure centre in Wootton Bassett, has offered to do what he can to help to save the Cricklade centre too.

He told the children and the residents that their actions were bringing pressure to bear on the council.

Speaking after the event he said: "In all my years in politics I have never such a strength of feeling as I have seen here today and that demands that the council listens.

"The idea that people in Cricklade will be paying the same level of council tax as other people in the area but are losing the leisure centre is demon-strably undemocratic and unfair, and the council clearly needs to look elsewhere to find the funding to help keep this facility open, and there an endless number of examples where this can be done.

"We really must fight very hard indeed."

An emergency meeting of North Wiltshire District Council will take place next Tuesday during which the subject of the Cricklade Leisure Centre will be discussed. This has been bought forward from March 15.