Tu, Aug 9, 2005Sport England report on Sport and Local Delivery
Professor Neil Ravenscroft of the University of Brighton was commissioned by Sport England to look at "Sport and Local Delivery".He concluded that:
"...without substantial public funds to devote to provision, many local authorities will have to consider PFI and other funding routes if they wish to maintain their role as facilitators and enablers. Yet, this route carries significant dangers, in that the public sector may once again be locked into paying for large leisure centres that do little for the everyday fitness needs of ordinary people."
The report notes that:
access to local public facilities may be increasingly mediated by a commercial management sector driven by performance targets rather than genuinely social goals under new PFI and PPP arrangements in education, it is often the case that 'public' facilities are not available to the public at the very times that they are required
Download the full report
This is extremely relevant for Lewisham.
Both the Downham Project and the eventual replecement for Ladywell to be built at the Sundermead redevelopment are PFI projects.
As the Council commits to fund only about a third of the new leisure centre at the Sundermead development from its capital programme, the commercial partners of the Council will have the weight to put profitability as the most important guideline.
The late Paul Foot summed up PFI as follows:
“In every area where it has been adopted it has cost more, and will go on costing more. The PFI hysteria in the Labour Government led to an enormous transfer of power in Britain: from public, elected authorities to private, unelected corporations.”