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Comment by b800h | Hacker News Reader

We used to have lots of these in the UK, but their ownership was largely in the hands of borough councils, and as a consequence most have been torn down and replaced with a Tesco Express.

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It's sad when this happens, but I've lived in various random places in England over the last 2 decades and one of the first things I do when moving to a new area is find one of these little swimming baths for my evening swim. I have to say, outside of city centers we don't seem to be doing too bad still. I think at least 3 of the 5 I've frequented were Victorian era or at least 100 or so years old.

E: just did a quick search and apparently of the 116 listed bath buildings, most of which were constructed before 1936, only 52 remain operational or are in the process of being operational. So perhaps you're right. Real shame, these places are often so valuable for the community, especially smaller/poorer ones.

(Shout out to Withington baths[1] which was my favourite place in the world back when I was a student)

[1] https://maps.app.goo.gl/Lze2wgCF9QtisdmPA

Yeah. One thing I have said a few times is that if we still had the same relationship with local government we had in the past a lot of what are now subscription gyms would probably be owned by the taxpayer, for good or bad.

Build a council swimming pool, don't maintain it correctly for 30+ years, conclude it's beyond repairs and tear it down (But in fairness those 60s buildings were crap).

At least where I am they are building a replacement. But they have "awarded" management to a private company for some reason.

It's a lot simpler to do a single tender and outsource the whole problem of management to a large company than to recruit 20-30 people, project managers etc etc. Council staff are overstretched as it is. This just comes down to expediency and, to some extent, laziness.

It’s the same reason companies outsource things which aren’t their “core competency”. It’s the same reason that people outsource their infrastructure to Amazon.

Why they don't put the Tesco over them? In Turkey, there's this tradition(?) of renting part of the public infrastructure to businesses. Mosques are especially popular, many mosques have a shopping centre or a supermarket at the ground floor.

Like this: https://maps.app.goo.gl/ftmq3tw4oDDKJwWt7

The downside is that it's ugly AF and they obviously don't sell alcohol in these, however it doesn't have to be ugly.

Let's hope they'll return!

Not a chance, 13 years of the tories have seen to that. They shredded local authority finances early on and as a result a lot of the services have been closed as they still limit the tax raising powers of local govt - local authorities were and are heavily reliant on grants from central govt. This is one of the biggest weaknesses of the UK: it's a complex country of 60+ million people governed almost entirely from a few blocks in London.

Ever seen Skint? That shit is so fucking dark

It's too convenient to blame the Tories for everything.

Many local authorities have very badly managed their finances. We've seen it in the recent bankruptcies of Slough and Birmingham (both Labour-led by the way) where incompetence and possibly corruption was rife.

I was in London in the first decade of the 2000s, and pools were closing left, right and centre then too. The councils are terribly badly run, and the old buildings, with higher upkeep costs, are just too tempting to close when they're on a balance sheet with everything else.

Are they badly run, or just having to prioritise things like schools, social services, etc. over “luxuries” like leisure centres?

Many are badly run (I gave two examples above).

It does not mean that they don't face challenges in general because of cuts in funding. But, as always, bad management makes the shit hit the fan when times are leaner.

I am convinced that it is possible to balance the books on a leisure centre, for instance.

Heating costs for pools quadrupled over the last 18 months. They’ve come down a bit, but that’s still a massive impact.

Salaries have shot up too, and have done for 20 years, as minimum wage has increased well beyond average wages or inflation.

But the largest impact on council funding in general is the increased money going into looking after the elderly, and that sometimes means selling off the land a leisure centre was on to pay for that for a couple of years, doesn’t matter that the centre was slightly profitable, it was occupying a large amount of land value that could be spent on Generation Me instead.

In the UK, I think schools and social services are broadly a central government thing, not local council.

This gets less true with schemes like council housing.

Schools are the responsibility of the local council.

Then, "free schools" were created during Cameron's time as PM (Gove as Education Secretary), which are 'independent' of the local council.

There's actually remarkably little that they can decide properly for themselves these days, but they have low budgets, and eventually the low budgets lead to underqualified and overstretched staff, who then compound the problem with poor decisions.

For anyone who might not realise in the 20s london had a labour mayor, and the U.K. had a labour government.

The usual rebuttal is something along the lines of “no true labour”.

As bad as the mayor and councils may have been, from my outside perspective it would be hard to do as poorly as the UK government has over the last decade. It’s been farcical, and the show continues.

the tories used that as an excuse. There has always been badly run councils - so instead of fixing the problem they used it to reduce the power of local councils

this is a very common theme in the uk -

find an edge case and use it to justify anything you want. But while conveniently and hypocritically coming up with excuses to justfy the things you want (or just sweep crap under the carpet)

If there has always been badly run councils then it's too convenient to blame them on the Tories.

I feel that this is the cost of being in power for 13 years (for either side). At some point some people forget, or don't know, that the other party is not the panacea, either, and that not everything can be pinned on the party in power.

There is a massive amount of crap that has nothing to do with the Tories and, again, we've recently seen that in Slough and Birmingham.

So if you think that when the next Labour PM is going to be appointed by the King the crap will disappear you're bound to be very sorely disappointed.

>So if you think that when the next Labour PM is going to be appointed by the King the crap will disappear you're bound to be very sorely disappointed.

until PR is put in place this pantomine will continue (it will still take a long time before it gets much better). For me the main difference is intent - both parties crave power, but the tories have a seriously much lower bar than labour in the things or people they will screw over

Following that angle, don't worry that Labour's intent is to screw over as many people as the Tories. Perhaps different people, but that's about it.

The difference, perhaps, is the veneer of "good intentions" but as we know the road to he'll is paved with good intentions...

As for PR, we'll the third party is the Lib Dems, who are living in the twilight zone at this point so, no luck there, either.

the system we have place was designed for two parties only - it gives the party in power a dictatorship with informal controls (Boris knew and abused this)

any more than two parties messes everything up - specifically for left leaning parties, becasue labour and lib dems typically have a bigger overlap than the tories and lib dems (espically since ukip has seemlingly taken over the tories)

the current system is monterously unfair and very undemocratic. but the conservatives and labour like the idea of unlimited power and will fight it all the way.

https://www.electoral-reform.org.uk/voting-systems/what-are-...

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