If you live in Richmond Park or Kingston and Surbiton and are thinking of voting for Sarah Olney or Ed Davey, watch Ms Olney's video from 2021 and read the text below.
1. Sport England invested £337000 in new changing rooms at The Kingfisher in 2016.
Sarah Olney says in this video in September 2021 that Kingston Council was told in 2016 that The Kingfisher Leisure Centre was coming to the end of its useful life.
2. The Lib Dem run Kingston council formed plans to demolish The Kingfisher Leisure Centre initially with no plans at all for a replacement and then, when legally challenged, with plans that were not costed, committed or funded.
Sarah Olney says in this video that she supported the Lib Dem council decision to knock down The Kingfisher Leisure Centre
3. Current unapproved and uncosted and uncommitted council plans are to build a leisure centre remarkably similar to The Kingfisher but which is likely to be much more expensive for people to use.
Sarah Olney says that the Lib Dem council wants to "build what they aim to be the best leisure centre in London".
4. The Kingfisher Leisure Centre was closed in 2019 and later demolished. It is now June 2024, and no plans have been made, let alone costed and committed to build a replacement leisure centre.
Sarah Olney says that the aim is for the pool to be open in 2024, "the 40th anniversary of the original Kingfisher".
5. How will the new leisure centre be paid for?
A budget provision of £40 million has been made for a new leisure centre in the council's financial accounts, but this does not mean that the cash is available for such a project. Other key infrastructure and social infrastructure projects to support 10,000 new homes in Kingston will need to be funded out of the same pot of money. It could be that the effective sale of land on The Cattle Market and parts of The Guildhall land will form part of a package agreed with a developer that persuades them to build a new leisure centre as long as their profit margins are sufficiently high across the whole package of new high rise housing across Kingston Town.
Sarah Olney says nothing about how a new leisure centre will be funded and what it means for Kingston.
Remember that, in order to support developer profit, the LibDem council has all but given away the huge piece of land on which the Cambridge Road Estate stands to the development company tearing it down and rebuilding it. The council has also agreed to buy 50 flats from the developer at market price of £500000 each because the developer's projected profits were plummeting. If these flats are used for social housing, they might represent the most expensive social housing provided by a council in London.
The Cambridge Road Estate is in Ed Davey's constituency and Davey's wife, Emily Davey, was in charge of the plans to demolish and rebuild the estate that have led to the mess facing Kingston Council's social housing tenants across the Borough as the council's dedicated social housing funds look to reach critically low levels.
Sarah Olney asks the question about how a new leisure centre will be paid for on the video, but she does not answer it.
She says only that a new leisure centre will NOT be funded by the sale of The Fairfield.