Since around 2010, England alone has seen hundreds of swimming pool closures – estimates suggest almost 400 fewer pools in the decade following austerity-era funding cuts and rising costs. Pools have continued to close or face closure for multiple reasons, including operating deficits, ageing infrastructure, and constrained local government finances.
These closures have resulted in loss of social value through reduced health and wellbeing benefits, activity levels and community cohesion associated with community aquatic provision. Evidence shows that the cumulative impact of withdrawing pool infrastructure is not just a loss of physical assets but a loss of community health and social capital.
The experience of the United Kingdom provides relevant lessons for how Australian councils respond to their ageing public swimming pool portfolio and growing renewal backlog.
The UK experience demonstrates that withdrawing or constraining funding without redesigning service models leads to asset failure rather than orderly transition. Prolonged deferral of maintenance and reliance on short-term fixes resulted in widespread deterioration of pool infrastructure and an eventual wave of forced closures, often triggered by safety or compliance failures rather than strategic choice.
Facility-by-facility decision-making produced inequitable access outcomes. In the absence of regional or national planning frameworks, individual councils were left to manage aquatic infrastructure independently. This resulted in uneven geographic access, duplication in some catchments and complete loss of aquatic facility provision in others, driven more by local financial capacity than community need.
The UK experience highlights the risks of treating public swimming pools as discretionary leisure assets rather than preventative health and safety infrastructure. This framing weakened their protection during periods of fiscal pressure and obscured the broader public health, water safety and social benefits delivered by pools. Subsequent analysis has shown that closures led to reduced physical activity participation and increased inequality of access.
Short-term financial savings achieved through closures or service reductions often resulted in long-term public costs borne by other parts of government, including health and emergency services. These downstream impacts were rarely measured or attributed, creating a misleading picture of value for money.
While community-led management and asset transfer models emerged as mitigation measures in some UK locations, they proved uneven and limited in scale, and could not substitute for coordinated government policy or sustainable funding frameworks. Once pools closed, reopening was rare and costly, making closure effectively irreversible.
For Australia, these lessons underline the importance of early intervention, regional planning, and shared responsibility across all levels of government. Addressing the aquatic infrastructure challenge through isolated, council-by-council decisions risks repeating the UK experience, whereas a coordinated, system-level approach offers the greatest opportunity to preserve access, equity and public value.
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