Leisure Futures

Oxford City Council prides itself in delivering world class services and innovatively finding new solutions to meet today’s challenges. We are a multi award-winning council with an excellent track record.​Like most councils, our budgets are under immense pressure. While the Council will do all it can to prioritise protecting services that support the most vulnerable, we will need to find new ways of doing things and need to take tough choices to balance our budget.​Our leisure centres contract expires in April 2024, which provides an opportunity for these facilities to better meet changing community needs – to reflect this we are considering changing the name from Leisure to Active Wellbeing Centres. ​We will look to provide the best possible leisure service – we will do this through a period of dialogue with potential operators and compare this with an in-house comparator. We want an innovative solution that balances cost and social value and to improve the role the centres play in delivering the outcomes in the Council’s Corporate Plan. We are keen to explore how we can improve the links with parks and outdoor activity.​This provides an opportunity to integrate local authority services to enable a preventative, customer focussed long-term model to be developed. We now have a window of opportunity to reimagine how Oxford’s leisure centres could play a more substantial role in tackling health inequalities that is more integrated with work by health and Oxfordshire County Council Public Health providers. The recently produced Fit for the Future: the role of district councils in improving health and wellbeing makes a strong case for integrating council-run leisure and wellbeing services into the health system.​​