Good News - The Council has Started to Listen

Last week was very significant in our campaign. It was a year since I first put posters up in Hove Park asking for users to share their awareness of the council’s plans to remove investment that would potentially lead to the closure of many tennis courts. Since then our very successful campaign has forced the council to rethink and to consider alternatives, particularly the direction provided by the local and national governing body and an independent consultation by community works to: • Allow sites that can demonstrate true community interest and social responsibility to develop their own self managed clubs. • To reach out to professional third parties who are successfully operating courts up and down the country to help run some of our facilities. Last winter was incredible hard work talking to the users at each site and analysing viability based on the appetite to become self-sustaining and third party options based on countrywide research. Through awareness with a successful petition of over 2000 people, press, radio and TV we informed users and the council of the alternatives that existed and of the valued assets that tennis courts represent in our city. It was pleasing that this week the Environment, Transport & Sustainability Committee agreed to the following: ‘That the Committee accepts in principle the proposal from Queen’s Park Tennis Club to operate the tennis courts in Queen’s Park as set out at Appendix 10 of the report.’ It is great news that we have a club and members who are prepared to take on providing Tennis facilities in Queens Park. Some key people have achieved this through a lot of hard work over many years with a properly constituted committee and policies to ensure community engagement and inclusion. I sincerely hope that users at other tennis courts come together quickly and collaborate to form similar clubs, demonstrating they can run their own tennis facilities with players of all ages and coaching and playing opportunities for everyone. The ETS committee also agreed to the following: ‘That the Committee approves the undertaking of soft market testing by officers to identify if some or all of the remaining council tennis courts in the city could be operated by a not for profit organisation. A further report would be brought back to Committee with the outcome of the soft market testing.’ It is recognised that some sites do not have users who could run their own facilities and it is appropriate that the council explores alternatives to make these sites viable using best practice that successfully exists elsewhere. These outcomes were exactly the intention of our campaign to explore all options to keep tennis alive in our city for all residents. Well done and thank you to everyone who has participated in the campaign; this week has demonstrated what can be achieved and hopefully will be the best possible outcome.