£51m approved for rebuilding of Sheffield's Springs Leisure Centre
Construction work on the new building is due to start in late 2026.
Sheffield Green councillors have made an unsuccessful call for more scrutiny of plans to spend £51m on rebuilding a city leisure centre.
Couns Martin Phipps and Douglas Johnson raised their objections on Monday (November 17) at Sheffield City Council’s finance and performance policy committee. Councillors approved the budget to rebuild Springs Leisure Centre in Arbourthorne but the two Green Party committee members abstained.
Construction work on the new building is due to start in late 2026. As the new building will lie within the current leisure centre site, the old one can stay open until its replacement is completed.
Facilities in the new building will include a six-lane swimming pool and teaching pool. gyms, a sports hall, a wellbeing spa, a bowls hall and a cafe. There will also be space for health and community activities.
Councillors heard that an initial decision to either update or rebuild older leisure centres such as Ponds Forge, Springs, Hillsborough and Concord was taken by the council’s former co-operative executive leadership in 2021.
The aim was to make centres more efficient to run so they could become self-financing and also to help more people to stay fit and healthy. That became part of a £117m Leisure Investment Programme.
Some work was done in time for the running of leisure centres to be handed over to operator Everyone Active in January of this year.
Councillors heard that some decisions about the Springs project were undertaken by senior council officers in conjunction with leading councillors. Greens argued that cut across the committee system of council governance introduced following a city referendum in 2022.
Coun Phipps said that the communities, parks and leisure policy committee should have had greater oversight of the project before it came for finance committee approval. He said: “It just doesn’t feel like it’s undergone the due process it should do in a committee process.”
Councillors were told that the project had been discussed by the communities, parks and leisure (CPL) committee in briefings, including about the cost of the project, which was only recently finalised.
Coun Johnson said that information should have been presented to the committee in a report so that it could be clearly understood and referred back to.
LibDem leader Coun Martin Smith said: “Colleagues in CPL have had at least three briefings on this since June. I would respectfully disagree about the lack of oversight.”