‘Our council wanted to shut us down. Eleven years later, we’re thriving – and in profit’

Is your community stepping in where it has been abandoned by the council? Let us know at money@telegraph.co.uk

It’s 11 in the morning in Stocksbridge, a leafy village 10 miles north of Sheffield city centre. Faye Howard could be living a quiet life in retirement here. Instead, the 78-year-old has been on her feet since 6am, helping to manage the bustling leisure centre at the heart of the community for no remuneration whatsoever.

She has been doing this since 2013. Had she not, the building might have been knocked down by now. The council that used to run the site planned to mothball it after making budget cuts.

As desperate local authorities look to cut costs, community groups have been increasingly stepping in to run the facilities that councils try to abandon.

Over the last decade, Howard, together with a group of local volunteers, has turned the once-dilapidated sports centre into a profit-making business run by its local community. The For Stocksbridge Leisure Centre (4SLC) group estimates the centre has 1,000 members – a sizeable share of the parish’s population of 13,000.

It’s half term at the centre, and families are attending swimming lessons, young men are working out in the gym and teenagers play squash. Stocksbridge has one of the few indoor bowls rinks in Britain, and it doubles as a martial arts hall.

The clientele varies, but the centre is remarkably popular with retirees. Jill, another volunteer, chirpily remarks that the oldest woman in the badminton class she runs is 90. 

Howard, a former retail manager at John Lewis, says the last 10 years have involved a lot of ruthless book-balancing: the centre makes money from local sports clubs, paying members of the public and food sold in its café. 

Volunteers pooled business acumen to cut running costs. The lights have all been replaced with LEDs, 30 solar panels have been installed and biomass boilers have been replaced by cheaper-to-run gas boilers. 

Much of the routine maintenance work has been done by local handymen for free, and the centre keeps a supply of paint donated by friendly staff from hardware shops. 

“We use local tradespeople where we can – and they often come back to volunteer,” explains Howard. “Whereas with the council with its procurement procedure, it has traders it always uses, and it often ends up paying more in mileage, energy and labour costs.”

Stocksbridge Leisure Centre was first faced with closure 10 years ago as Sheffield City Council scrambled to make £50m worth of cuts to its budget. The centre, the council argued, was too costly to run and visitor numbers were falling. 

After a lengthy court battle between the council and campaigners, the site was mothballed, leaving residents to develop a business plan to save it.

Since then it has existed in a perpetual state of slow renovation. What had once been a dark, damp pathway between the sports hall and swimming pool is now a bright modern café. 

“This bit was just a derelict muddy rubbish dump,” says Howard, gesturing towards a wildflower-lined pathway outside. “It flooded regularly and it smelled because all we had down here were carpets.”

One advantage community-run groups have over councils is that they can receive cash injections from the Lottery Fund or Sport England, both of which contributed towards the £1m needed to build the café.

A large portion of its staff are volunteers, which shields Stocksbridge from the cost of paying an ever-increasing minimum wage. 4SLC estimates the 6,000 hours of volunteering shaved £70,879 off its running costs last year. Some of the only paid staff are the lifeguards.

But the greatest savings have been due to innovative cost-cutting: the benches in the swimming pool were salvaged from the Don Valley Stadium, demolished in 2013, and the sofas lining the bowls hall were rescued from an Indian restaurant after it rejected the upholsterer’s design.

Public sports centres such as Stocksbridge’s are becoming vanishingly rare. Last year, the Local Government Association warned that sport and leisure services across Britain were facing “an extraordinary financial crisis due to the ongoing impacts from Covid-19, the cost of living, and the energy crisis”.

Leisure facilities were excluded from extra government support for energy bills, and the LGA warned that, as a result, 74pc of councils could be forced to close leisure centres in 2024. In his Autumn Statement, Chancellor Jeremy Hunt allocated £60m towards improving the energy efficiency of Britain’s leisure centres, but by March only £20m had been distributed.

More broadly, council budgets have never been worse: faced with a toxic cocktail of long-term government funding cuts and soaring demand for children’s social care and housing, many are on the brink of financial failure. 

Grant Thornton estimated that four in 10 councils could be forced to issue a section 114 notice, effectively declaring bankruptcy, within the next five years. 

Six, including Birmingham City and Nottingham City, have already done so. The crisis has pushed some local authorities to embrace enhanced powers to tax second home-owners – a move which has been criticised for catching out unintended targets.

As the situation worsens, Britons will be faced with either higher council tax bills or the axing of beloved services. In some parts of the country, this is already happening: in 2022, Peterborough City Council stopped planting spring and summer bedding plants in the city – a move which it said would save £50,000 a year. 

In recent years councils have appealed directly to residents – mostly retirees – to pick up the slack. Aberdeenshire’s Turriff Cemetery has been maintained by a volunteer group since 2018, and Weston-super-Mare’s iconic floral clock is similarly looked after by locals, both with a little help from their local councils.

The bulk of council cost-cutting has been in the closure of expensive-to-run facilities such as leisure centres and libraries. In 2018, Northamptonshire County Council handed over 10 libraries to volunteer groups, while retirees in Bradford and Dewsbury have also taken over local leisure centres threatened with closure.

Councils argue that such facilities are underused and haemorrhage cash. In Stocksbridge’s case, the centre was losing some £500,000 a year. But groups such as 4SLC argue that they can be made self-sufficient with a bit of business savvy and a common sense approach lacking in council workers.

“The main principle is you have to treat it like a business,” says Howard. “If your costs are less than what’s coming in, it’s successful. Our first appointment wasn’t a leisure manager, it was a business manager.”

She adds that the centre eases pressure on health services by offering elderly members activities such as hydrotherapy. “We talk about the NHS – and politicians are always funding it – but there’s so much prevention you can do before people need to rely on it.”

Howard’s husband had a stroke last year, leaving him partially paralysed. “You get 12 weeks’ physiotherapy on the NHS and then it dropped off a cliff,” she says. “That’s where the community should be. They’re able to pick up and allow people to keep their dignity and independence.”

But the future of community-run projects relies on a new crop of volunteers. “It’s like catching a bug. You’ve got it and you can’t let go,” she says. “The oldest trustee is 82, but we desperately need young blood. We need people that are newly retired who can come in and take over the work.”