More problems with town’s pool

More complaints about Spalding’s ageing swimming pool have been made this week.

As the results of a public consultation on the future of leisure provision in South Holland are being discussed by the council, staff issues have been blamed by the company running the town’s Castle Swimming Pool.

The Voice was contacted last week by a grandmother after her grandchildren were turned away from the training pool for three weeks running due to staff issues.

This week the cancellation of Aqua-Fit classes have been criticised.

The class organiser is on holiday, but a customer said that wasn’t the problem, but a lack of cover was.

“The trainer is entitled to her holiday, gives you notice of her holiday and you cannot get yourselves together to cover the classes,” she posted on a website.

A month-long public consultation exercise was held in the summer and the results are currently being analysed for South Holland District Council.

The future of the leisure provision across the district is likely to be discussed by members before the end of this year.

There have been several complaints about the Castle swimming pool, including sudden cancellation of pool use and heating issues.

The pool is more than 40 years old and the learner pool was closed for weeks earlier this year when a replacement part had to be ordered for the heat exchanger.

There have been issues with the pool’s temperature, cleanliness and staffing levels in the recent past.

The centre is run by St Ives-based 1Life – a company which specialises in lifestyle management.

It runs more than 30 local authority venues around the country, including leisure centres and theatres.

The company also runs the Bourne Leisure and Stamford Leisure pools – both of which are newer than the Castle complex.

A spokesperson from 1Life said: “We would like to apologise to the users of Castle Sports Swimming Pool for the recent unavoidable closures of the learner pool. We are actively recruiting and training more lifeguards and this has impacted the rota of trained and qualified personnel.

“We take the health and safety of our users extremely seriously and as a result we have needed to close the learner pool on two occasions for a very short period of time but during this time we have ensured the main pool has remained open.

“Our aqua teacher did have annual leave booked this week and as a result this class was cancelled. We did call our members who had booked onto the class to advise them of this cancellation.

“We would like to thank the community for their patience and support during this time.”