Dear Customer,
Current Government advice is that leisure centres will reopen no earlier than the 4th July and there still remains a lot of uncertainty about when the Government will give the green light. This makes planning challenging.
The Active Leeds service is now moving towards re-opening, liaising closely with colleagues within the Council as well as utilising our wider sector networks and building on the survey responses that many of you kindly provided.
However other professional bodies, including Swim England, have produced guidance which we are using as a basis upon which to model how we can bring our sites and programmes back safely and at the appropriate time.
We continue to undertake our own risk assessments on a site by site basis in order to assess the practicalities of reopening. Each site is different and some carry particular challenges, with some sites allowing for social distancing much more easily than others. We know the guidance will limit the number of people in the building at any one time and therefore we have to manage numbers of people coming in and out of the buildings, we are therefore looking at a pre booking approach as a way of managing this requirement.
To ensure our leisure centres can safely and securely reopen, it is likely that we will need to reopen them in phases. The speed at which we can reopen is dependent on guidance but also the availability of staff – many of whom have been redeployed into the front line COVID response such as social care. We have to be especially mindful of not adversely impacting upon these critical functions.
Each activity requires its own risk assessment. It is likely that we will in the first instance open up our gyms and fitness classes at a selection of sites and we will then work towards opening more of our spaces over time, such as swimming pools, always making sure we adhere and adapt to the relevant Government guidelines and ensuring that customer and staff wellbeing is central to our approach.
We empathise with those of you who are desperate to return to regular physical activity and share your frustrations. Protecting the health and wellbeing of both customers and staff remains our primary concern, and this will inform any future decisions that we take regarding the reopening of any facilities at our individual leisure centres.
Kind regards
Mark Allman
Head of Active Leeds
