Portsmouth swimming pools: Political war of words breaks out over lack of pools in Portsmouth

Dame Meg Hillier DBE, chair of the public account committee and Portsmouth South MP Stephen Morgan met to discuss the absence of public swimming pools in the south of the city.

The MPs also took aim at the council’s proposed Bransbury Park leisure centre which has been delayed.

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Eastney swimming pool closed in March 2020, and the announcement was made later that year that the Pyramids pool would be closed. It has since been replaced by the Exploria soft play centre. The now-demolished Victoria baths on Anglesea Road were demolished in 2010.

Dame Meg, who went to school in Portsmouth, said: ‘I used to swim at Eastney Baths, I swam at Victoria Baths – for me, it was a great release to swim and now you can’t swim anywhere in the south of the city.

‘I look at big projects all the time, you have to have a really clear plan and a very good scope of the project.

‘The council said that they nailed down this leisure centre and yet there’s no planning application. A council like Portsmouth has a huge opportunity to help improve the health of residents and yet you can’t go swimming.’

‘We’ve got to make sure that we’ve got more preventative work going on with the health service, the focus on the NHS shouldn’t all be about treatment, it should be about preventing people from getting ill in the first place – that’s why exercise is so important.’

Mr Morgan added that most leisure and cultural facilities in the city are not ‘fit for purpose’.

He said: ‘It’s outrageous that in the south of the city, people don’t have access to public swimming facilities.

‘We’ve got the new fantastic new facilities at the university where they spent £57m but that won’t be affordable for a good number of local people.

‘People are disappointed by the Liberal Democrats that are running the council, there’s tired leadership locally and a lack of ambition. They’ve promised the earth but they are yet to deliver.

‘There’s no planning application, no decisions being made, no funding being secured from Sport England – they are letting the city down.’

Council leader Gerald Vernon-Jackson said Dame Meg ‘will know that almost no councils anywhere in the country are building pools’.

‘Portsmouth is unusual in having the ambition to build new pools, way more ambitious than most Labour councils,’ he added. ‘It’s been slightly delayed because we’ve got to redesign it to fit in a new GP surgery.

‘We’re an island city, this will bring in a 25m pool but more importantly, it will have a learner pool for kids. We’re surrounded by the sea and it’s really important that kids have the chance to learn to swim.

‘I’m constantly surprised and disappointed at the lack of support from our Labour colleagues. They’re not interested in the Conservatives at all, they’re only interested in us because when we had a Conservative leader of the council, it was because the Labour members voted her in. In the council, Labour and Conservative tend to be close together, Labour is more interested in giving us a hard time instead of the Tories.’