MORE than 400 leisure centre members in East Herts have abandoned their memberships after Fanshawe and Leventhorpe leisure centres and swimming pools closed in December, it has been revealed reports the Local Democracy Reporter.

At a meeting of East Herts Council’s audit and governance committee yesterday (Wednesday, 28 May), councillors were told that around 425 members at Fanshawe and Leventhorpe had decided not to transfer their memberships to a different site.

Dan Humphries, speaking on behalf of leisure centre operator Everyone Active, said around forty per cent of Leventhorpe members and sixty per cent of Fanshawe members had transferred their membership to a new centre.

Cllr Sarah Hopewell, executive member for wellbeing, said there had been “a lot of positives” for the council’s leisure facilities in 2024 – including 1.65m visits, up for 1.4m in 2023 – but added: “It’s kind of a sad year as well because we know that, following the ending of Department for Education funding to Leventhorpe and Fanshawe, unfortunately those facilities did have to close at the end of last year.

“There was a huge amount of effort in the community and by ward councillors and by our MP [Josh Dean] to see if that money could be restored or if another solution could be found.

“Efforts are ongoing with Fanshawe between the community group there and the town council, so hopefully there can still be a future for that facility.

“There was also a lot of work to try to transfer users from Fanshawe and Leventhorpe to our other two facilities, and fortunately, quite a few users were able to be transferred, so that was positive.”

Learn to Swim members at Fanshawe in Ware and Leventhorpe in Sawbridgeworth were offered moves to other sites run by Everyone Active.

It led to around 230 members moving from Fanshawe to Hartham Leisure Centre, and 300 transferring from Leventhorpe to Grange Paddocks Leisure Centre. 

Explaining why some members have chosen to leave, Mr Humphries told councillors: “From a swim perspective, what we’ve found is it’s comfort. I’m comfortable, my son swims at the same time. To disrupt that and come to a completely different centre, lots of people didn’t necessarily want to do that.

“And when they’ve got to a certain stage in the conversation where they feel their child can swim 25 metres, appears to be very comfortable … [they’ve] decided to do other things, whether that’s football, whether that’s other things.

“Depending on where you come from in Leventhorpe, getting to Grange Paddocks is a distance. Similarly, at Fanshawe, getting into Hertford at times is not necessarily easy.

“For some people, it just wasn’t necessarily a practical decision for them to do that.

“For those that live on the right side of Sawbridgeworth and Ware, it’s probably not been too much of an inconvenience for them.“

In terms of enticing those people, from a membership perspective, we’ve held the same price that those customers paid at Fanshawe and Leventhorpe for 12 months.

“They’re paying the same price as what they would have been paying, which is substantially lower than what current Grange Paddocks members pay.

“We don’t want it to be a double whammy where you’ve now got to pay a different price and you’ve now got to travel further.

“We’re acutely aware it wasn’t a popular decision, and I think everybody would like it not to be so, but the reality is that it is.

“We’ve tried to encourage people by fixing that price level for 12 months and, from a swimming perspective, trying to make it as easy as we can, but logistically for some people, depending on where they live, it just wasn’t feasible for them to do that.” 

In better news for the leisure centres in East Herts, the number of unique active users rose by 2,735 in 2024 compared to 2023, and the number of over-60s swimming increased nine per cent. 

Gym attendance also increased significantly among senior users – up 46 per cent year-on-year.

Overall, fitness membership increased by 1.4 per cent across 2024, though membership sales fell by 1,510 to 14,602.