There’s no plan b for learning to swim

What happens when there are no swimming pools? Communities in Scotland are about to find out, according to reporting in the Herald today based on research by the GMB union that shows that 500 swimming pools have closed across the UK, with half of them closing in the last five years.

This is entirely predictable. Swimming pools are expensive to maintain (because they leak), to run (because they use a lot of energy) and to staff (because they are dangerous and need substantial supervision). Most are run by local authorities and in an era when local authority budgets are squeezed, you'd imagine pressure on swimming pool provision would increase.

Yet this is a classic financialised misunderstanding over the difference between cost and value. If you close a sports centre, people who use it can at least revert to jogging, or doing classes in a local town hall, or playing football in the park. At least in theory.

But there is no other space of any description in which it is possible in Scotland to teach young children to swim. And in the core set of personal skills that a child in Scotland should develop before adulthood, most people would include the ability to swim.

This is about more than granting children the ability to enjoy the seaside when on holiday or to make the most of Scotland's six warm summer days, it is about core safety. We are an island nation surrounded by water and Scotland is a wet country of rivers, burns and lochs. We will always be exposed to large bodies of open water.

If we create a generation of children who become adults who are unable to swim, we create a litany of trouble. Clearly there will be a sharp increase in loss of life in drowning incidents, but it will also affect how we plan the space around open water.

At the moment we child-proof water, but we do this on the assumption that we are protecting young children. In Scotland we operate on the assumption that older children and adults will have at least basic proficiency in swimming. Unless we are careful we will no longer be able to make that assumption.

There is of course a long chain of reasons why we have reached this point. At an overarching level we have no proper national planning of local infrastructure and yet we have also slashed the funding of local authorities which do plan local infrastructure. The pattern has been predictable.

First, Scotland's enormous local authorities centralise provision internally. Rather than having a local community pool, you move to larger, more distant municipal pools, and then to the smaller number of large local authority-wide facilities. Each stage is driven by budget constraints which do not relent.

But there are other reasons this has happened. One of them is the 'quangoisation' of leisure services in many local authorities. In a fit of ideological self-serving, a lot of local authorities hived off their leisure services into various forms of arms-length body (which not coincidentally often involved the creation of lucrative board positions for local councillors).

Because 'leisure' is erroneously seen as an 'optional extra which the public can take or leave' and because there have always been charges for most leisure services, there became an increasing assumption that these should be run as largely self-financing companies. This has in turn pushed prices up and often priced these services out of the reach of many citizens.

Undoing all of this is not a simple matter. At the core of this is the need to decentralise government and to insulate local government funding from the narrow interests of central government. At least local authorities can be put under pressure over closing facilities where the fact that many are closing because central government has chosen to square its own finances by slashing local funding is hard to campaign against.

Yet in the end that is what has happened. Local communities rely on local infrastructure which is provided by local government and this is the part of the public sector which has been serially cut the most in the devolution era. There is very little read-across of the impact on national objectives that this has had.

Swimming pools are a special case and there must be concerted additional action to preserve provision and to make absolutely sure that it is available to all children as a core part of their schooling. But it is only the tip of an iceberg of social provision which is being squeezed with significant real-world consequences which don't appear on the spreadsheet which justifies the squeeze.

We need a proper recognition at a national level of the need for local infrastructure and a decentralisation programme that ensures its survival for generations to come. You can find more on this in Common Weal's work on local democracy and public infrastructure.