The Cost To Run

What Are The Benefits To The Community?

The proposed new complex:

• Is Community owned and run
• Provides an attractive and hospitable community hub
• Supports a healthy lifestyle for young and old at affordable cost
• Creates local capacity to teach children to swim
• Meets the wide range of Community needs
• Contributes to the health of the local economy

How robust is the Business Case?

Evidence from across the UK suggests that a similar facility needs a customer base of about 120,000 people to break even financially. However, there are only around 66,000 people resident in the 235 square miles of North Dorset, of which barely 17000 live in Gillingham and the surrounding parishes.

Clearly the new facilities must serve a much wider area if they are to be both sustainable for the operator and affordable for the users. In the Business Plan we assume that the customer base for the new facilities encompasses everyone within a 5 mile/15 minute drive time of Gillingham town. On this basis the new complex will cater for a population nearer 30,000 living in Gillingham, Shaftesbury, Mere and all their surrounding Parishes.

The inescapable truth is that if the wider Community wants the new facilities to include even a modest swimming pool, everyone in that Community must ensure it is well used and also be prepared to pay a fair share of the subsidy needed each year to balance the books. This subsidy represents the net cost to the Community of owning these new facilities.

What will be the likely cost to run?

Both the income and expenditure of the new complex will be sensitive to the size and potential throughput of the facility and to the range of activities and amenities available to customers. Our consultants have access to a sophisticated model that can deal with the many dependencies and variables and deliver a realistic projection of costs. Variations due to change in pool size or addition/subtraction of amenities can be calculated.

How the complex is managed will also affect the costs to run. For example, savings on Business Rates and VAT are made under a Trust. The headline figures shown are averaged over a 10 year period and assume that the full business potential of Tennis and Fitness amenities are realised.

What Will Be The Likely Cost To Use?

A realistic charge must be set for using the new facilities mindful of the need to make them affordable for everyone whilst keeping the public subsidy to a minimum. Residents of Towns and Parishes which have committed to sustaining the facilities via their precept will be offered a beneficial rate.

What would this cost the Community to own?

The business case shows that to be commercially viable we need a customer base encompassing the three Market Towns of Gillingham, Shaftesbury and Mere, along with all their surrounding Parishes. We can now see the levels of public subsidy likely to be required annually to ensure that the new facilities remain available to the public.

There are approximately 12000 Band D Equivalent households in the proposed catchment area. Sharing a public subsidy fairly between them, each Band D household in this area would pay:

for new facilities that include a 6 lane 25 metre swimming pool

for new facilities that include a 4 lane 20 metre swimming pool