INTERVIEW
DC Leisure offers award-winning swim programmes DC Leisure – snapshot D
C Leisure currently manages 95 leisure facilities for almost 30 local authorities, handling 25 million leisure visits a year. It has built 11 new facilities in
the past six years, with £110m of investment through public- private partnerships and the Private Finance Initiative. It offers a range of programming designed to create
community engagement, social interaction and healthy lifestyles, and has made particular strides in getting more people involved in swimming. In 2011, its Swim4Health
And things are, as Philpott says,
moving fast in this area, not only within the realm of the DC Leisure-PfP deal but across the UK as a whole. While both companies are well aware they’re not going to change the housing and leisure development landscape overnight, the acquisition did come just ahead of rather auspicious times. The beginning of April 2013 saw the official launch of the new Health and Wellbeing Boards (see HCM April 13, p26 and p30) – a move that sees local authorities taking charge of NHS funds and directly delivering healthcare initiatives in the community. With no fixed rules, each board will develop its own methods of operation and delivery – making it a blank canvas for companies like DC Leisure and PfP to play their part in community wellbeing in the future. Philpott says it’s a major change and
a major challenge – not least because, as it works with almost 30 councils, DC Leisure now has almost the same number of H&W boards with which it must forge a relationship. He feels it’s a challenge the newly reinforced DC Leisure is well equipped to take on, and the company is already well ahead of
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programme won the first Spark of Innovation Award in the FIA (now rebranded ukactive) FLAME Awards – a programme that brought fitness for adults into the pool. Expanding its offering in the area of healthy living is a key
priority. It has successfully trialled the Gugafit (Get Up Get Active) programme for children and families, which has now been rolled out in most of its centres. For a small monthly fee, families record their eating and activity habits on a website and earn awards when weekly targets are met.
the game, creating a dedicated liaison role four years ago, with Susan Rossetto – previously in a public health role at Weight Watchers – currently in the post. DC Leisure also has plenty of
experience already in community- focused initiatives. “We’re not just about sport and physical activity,” says Philpott.
“We already do a lot of work around community and cohesion – keeping kids active and off the streets, for example, which has a crime prevention element. Any leisure offering is an important part of community health and wellbeing, happiness and social cohesion.” He continues: “What’s happening
with healthy living is really exciting, and the leisure industry is increasingly being seen as a legitimate part of the public health and sickness prevention programme. We’re now need to convince people that the money is well spent. Can we prove to them that a £1,000 investment in us is better than £1,000 invested in something else that might also have a health outcome?”
Building change For PfP, all this represents new ground, but the organisation seems receptive to
Read Health Club Management online at
healthclubmanagement.co.uk/digital
new ideas and paths. “We’re always looking for the next idea, the next thing to add value to what we do. We can learn as much from the bad examples as the good,” says Cowans. “For example, the way US home-owner associations run leisure facilities in their communities. Is that a good idea? Yes. Would it work in the UK? I don’t know. But these things are always worth exploring. “Now we have DC Leisure, we have
the expertise to look at possibilities that we haven’t touched on before now.” Future plans are very much pre-
drawing board, with neither side being able to go into specifics about how the housing/leisure mix might develop, but it’s clear the union will be even stronger than the sum of its parts. “Every individual part of the group is strong in its own right, and when you bring all these strands together you have something really unique,” says Cowans. For DC Leisure, it’s business as usual,
although going forward that business looks set to expand and operate on a grander scale. Philpott says: “We can’t change things overnight in terms of housing and leisure coming together, but the future has enormous possibilities.” ●
May 2013 © Cybertrek 2013
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