Council bosses insist they are still confident that a new leisure centre in Newcastle will be built before a “very tight” Government deadline expires.
City bosses are pushing to deliver a state-of-the-art new facility to replace the closed West Denton swimming pool, after being awarded almost £20m from the Government’s Levelling Up Fund last year. The move to build a new leisure centre, which will have two pools and a library, came after a public outcry over operator GLL shutting down the existing outer west pool in 2020.
But there have been fears that the new centre will not be built in time to meet a tight funding deadline – with the Government having said that it expects the funding awarded from the first round of the Levelling Up Fund to be spent by March 2024, or into the following financial year for larger projects deemed exceptional. That timeframe gives Newcastle City Council potentially less than two years to obtain planning permission for the development, demolish the existing facilities in West Denton Way, and build the new centre in their place.
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