Swimming is fantastic exercise – low impact and uses many different muscles. In fact, it is one of the few exercises that my doctors have recommended for the medical condition I have.

A lovely big, quality pool may encourage lots more people to swim more, helping with obesity and many other health issues. Swimming is something that children generally seem to love, or at least playing in water, which can be beneficial, even if it is not formal lane swimming.

So let’s build a good quality pool!

Except that no swimming pool ever seems to cover its costs. We need to consider how to fund a shortfall on running the swimming pool. Currently a much smaller facility is costing £170k per year. Inevitably that falls on council tax payers. Regardless of whether or not they want to use the pool, residents will pay for it.

Perhaps by including other facilities: work out facilities, courts for various sports, fitness sessions and so forth, all of which will charge, then some of the cost can be recovered. But there needs to be a lot of caution as these facilities often struggle to provide an adequate return and will compete with some of the professional gyms that don’t have to support a swimming pool. East Cambridgeshire District Council are very optimistic in their income forecasts from an operator of these facilities. Even without the costs of a pool to cover, most Council leisure centres fail to meet all their costs. If ECDC are currently spending £170,000 every year to support the existing smaller leisure centre, it is unreasonable to expect the needed support to be lower with a much larger pool.

The reality is that we need to consider how the running costs of this facility can be covered.

Of course there is one other area to think about: the cost of building the pool. Currently, significant amounts are being proposed to be funded through Community Infrastructure Levy from new housing developments. But this will still leave an unfunded amount of £9 million .

The options here are to borrow.

Borrowing of £9m over a period of 35 years, costing £0.6 million every year for the next 35 years.

Borrowing costs of £0.6m and running costs of £0.2m.

Who will pay that? Every single household. A burden of £0.8m on our council tax bills.

Now there are many of us who want a quality leisure centre, but the question that needs to be asked of council tax payers is whether or not they are prepared to pay £0.8m every single year from their Council tax.

Are you prepared to pay just under £100 extra per year to fund a new leisure centre?

We need a new leisure centre, but we need to be honest about the costs and we need our elected representatives to ask us what we are prepared to pay. We need to consider all the alternatives realistically and we need to think about innovative ways to encourage people to make the leisure centre pay its way.