Tu, Oct 25, 2005Sports Facility Calculator
Sport England has made available online a Sport Facility Calculator.
It's a clever program that allows local authorities to estimate the amount of sport provision that they should be working towards.
You must have Microsoft Excel with Macro enabled to make it work.For those that don't have it, click here or on the picture to see a screenshot of the results for Lewisham..
The result is that Lewisham should have 2,735.96 sq.m. of swimmable surface or 51,50 lanes (25 mt.) or 12,88 swimming pools.
Lewisham has officially 1873,50 sq.m. of swimming pools, but this includes the two private pools of the Borough, one at St. Dunstan College and the other at Old Colfe's Sports Ground.
So, it's probably about 1,500 sq. mt. of public swimming pool.
Quite a long way to optimum provision - Lewisham is at present third from the bottom in the laegue table of London Boroughs for swimming provision, and the current plan of the Council is to keep it there.
That's why it's so important to know what's the Council's opinion of this estimate coming from Sport England?
When at last Council (public questions - 14th September 2005) we asked:
What advice, if any, did the Council receive from Sport England on the closure of the Ladywell Pool?
this is how the Council's answer opened:
It is not usual for Sport England to become involved in this way, and therefore no specific advice was sought or received from them on the closure of the pool...
Really?
Understandably, on hearing that such is the opinion that Lewisham Council has of Sports England work, we submitted the following to be answered by tomorrow's Council meeting.
Sport England's on-line Sports Facility Calculator (SFC) seems to be a very useful tool designed to estimate the amount of key community sports facilities required to meet that needs of the local population.
How useful does the Council believe this tool to be - and would it consider that SFC estimates are realistic estimates that we should adopt for developing community sports facitlites?
We'll have the answer to this and other important questions by tomorrow night's full Council meeting.
The Council meeting is open to the public and takes place on Wednesday 26th October at 7:30 pm, Catford Town Hall - questions from the public are dealt on opening of the session. ...read more...