Swimming Facilities Debate
Full Debate: Read Full DebateDepartment: Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport
Tom Hayes
Main Page: Tom Hayes (Labour - Bournemouth East)Department Debates - View all Tom Hayes's debates with the Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport
Swimming Facilities
Tom Hayes Excerpts(3 days, 11 hours ago)
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Tom Hayes (Bournemouth East) (Lab)
Water is so important to Bournemouth, the coastal town that I represent. I commend Bournemouth swimming club and the 1.4 mile swim between Boscombe and Bournemouth piers, which is one of Europe’s largest charity swimming events.
We have swimming pools in Bournemouth, but only a few of them. Foremost among them is the Littledown centre’s 25-metre swimming pool, but schools tell me that they have limited opportunities for children to swim. If schools have few feasible places to go to, swimming opportunities are reduced. We can tackle child poverty, we can improve people’s life chances by, for example, resurrecting Sure Start and extending free school meals to families in receipt of universal credit, but we can also subsidise swimming lessons, provide free swimming passes, and invest in the swimming facilities that have been run down for so long. Leisure provision should be a statutory duty for local authorities, and we should have a Government—as we do with this Labour Government—who are committed to improving swimming for all.