Purpose

Since 2021 City of Doncaster Council has spent
or committed £19,733,095 across the portfolio of leisure
facilities to enable ongoing maintenance and significant
refurbishment of facilities. These monies have enabled works to be
undertaken to meet the backlog maintenance needs of the buildings
and where refurbishment has taken place to update and renew the
Physical Activity and Leisure offer.
The monies have enabled the programme of works across our Leisure
Stock
Designs and scoping worked commenced in 2019, initially for
Armthorpe and Hatfield. However, a flexible dynamic approach to the
investment, needed to be taken as the pandemic took hold, resulting
in significant delays and supply chain issues. This has been
further exasperated by the cost-of-living impact across all sectors
of the construction industry, resulting in significant cost
inflation. The Council have been able to secure additional external
funding specifically for Askern Leisure Centre (identified in table
above and fully approved) which led to extensive refurbishment
works and has led to the expansion of the offer available.
The next major refurbishment is at Thorne Leisure Centre which is
already in the approved capital programme with works well underway.
However as with the rest of the Leisure stock, due to the lack of
investment over the past 30 plus years, meant that significant
parts of the buildings and mechanical systems have deteriorated far
beyond expected standards and in some case full technical drawings
were not available resulting in hidden costs to replace features
not expected.
See attached Officer Decision Record (ODR) for further details
regarding the programme of works and costings.
It has been the intention of this ODR to highlight why it was
prudent to take a flexible approach to funding the portfolio and
adjust allocations as and when needed. This has allowed an approach
that does not replicate the lack of past investment resulting in a
patch work of maintenance and a poor offer that did not meet the
public needs or attract new users to access an active environment.
Therefore, following bi-monthly meetings with DCLT and City of
Doncaster colleagues there are revised costings and as such there
is a need to updated capital the capital programme accordingly
utilising resources approved/allocated specifically for the Leisure
stock under the management of DCLT per table 2, as detailed in the
attached Officer Decision Record.

Content

To provide update to ensure clarity of
investment decisions and appraise of current and future planned
works from existing approved resources.
Update of capital programme including realignments and future
expenditure (per table 3 as detailed in the attached Officer
Decision Record).