Folkestone Sports Centre Grant: Public Money, Private Asset, Big Questions for FHDC

On Wednesday 25 March, Folkestone & Hythe District Council’s Cabinet is due to decide whether to award The Sports Trust a £2,421,250 capital grant to reopen the swimming pool at Folkestone Sports Centre. The public case is easy to understand. The political attraction is obvious. But the papers also show that councillors are being asked to back a substantial investment in a building the council does not own, under a draft agreement that will still need finishing after the vote. The real question is not whether the pool should come back. It is whether the safeguards are tight enough, clear enough and final enough for a deal of this size.

The headline decision is clear enough. Report C/25/92 asks Cabinet to approve “a capital grant of £2,421,250 to The Sports Trust for works required to re-open Folkestone Sports Centre”, to approve “the Draft Grant Agreement as the conditions for the grant award”, and to authorise the Director of Housing and Operations “to complete and enter the grant agreement”. That wording matters. Cabinet is not being asked to sign a final executed contract on the spot. It is being asked to approve the grant and the draft conditions, with the finished agreement to follow. That is an important distinction, and an important correction.

The reason this has become such a live issue is also set out plainly in the papers. Folkestone Sports Centre Trust went into administration in August 2024 and the site closed. Since then, the report says, “Hythe Pool is the only available public swimming baths in the district.” At the time of closure, FHDC was already paying the former trust an annual revenue grant of £150,000, due to run until March 2026. In May 2025, The Sports Trust bought the site and began exploring whether the council would help fund a reopening.

From there, the story becomes one of narrowing the ask until it looked more defensible. The first proposal, in August 2025, sought £1.544 million in “shortfall” capital funding plus a four-year revenue grant of £200,000 a year. The report says that was rejected because it did not specifically fund reopening the pool, created “an uncertain position” on compliance with the Subsidy Control Act 2022, and would have committed the council to ongoing revenue support it did not want to give. The replacement proposal, submitted in October 2025, focused instead on the capital works needed to reopen the pool, reception and changing rooms, plus solar panels and flat-roof repairs. That is how the present £2,421,250 figure was reached.

The Sports Trust’s own submission is understandably upbeat. It describes Folkestone Sports Centre as “a much loved community asset”, says the organisation has created “more than 300,000 sports experiences in Folkestone and Hythe” in the last year, and argues that without reopening the pool there would be “a significant detrimental impact on the health and wellbeing of the local community, with people living in a coastal town left with nowhere to learn to swim.” The application also says the pool is “energy-hungry” and presents the wider package not just as repair work but as a chance to cut long-term costs through solar generation and battery storage.

The council report, however, is more sober, and more useful for that. It says the grant funds only part of a wider refurbishment project put at £4.5 million. The Trust will need “other income streams including land sales” to complete the remaining works and reopen facilities such as the gym and sports halls. That is where the central awkwardness comes in. FHDC is not being asked to invest in its own building. The report says The Sports Trust will “remain the property owner and responsible for the building and land.” Yet taxpayers are being asked to fund just over half of the wider refurbishment envelope. That is why earlier Shepway Vox coverage has kept circling back to the same question: why is the public paying so much into an asset the council does not own?

To be fair, the report does not dress this up as risk-free. It says the new capital grant is “a significant financial commitment with risks” and notes that the collapse of the former trust highlights “the commercial challenges facing the new owners.” It records that The Sports Trust’s latest audited accounts showed only limited free cash, including “Cash in the bank” of £79.5k, alongside a £14.2 million asset base that was mainly fixed assets and a £4 million long-term loan from the Roger De Haan Charitable Trust. It also notes that those accounts pre-date the Folkestone acquisition, and that the Trust’s expansion carries operational risk of its own. The report even draws the comparison: The Sports Trust employs around nineteen staff, while Folkestone Sports Centre employed around one hundred people at closure, albeit many part-time.

The safeguards set out in the report and the draft agreement are real enough. The council says payments will be retrospective, on receipt of invoices, and on an “open book” basis. The agreement says the funder will only reimburse “Eligible Expenditure already incurred”, that the “Maximum Sum will not be increased” in the event of overspend, and that the grant must be held in a separate bank account. The report adds that drawdown is intended to happen as works are completed over six months. There are also procurement controls: above £100,000, a full tender process; under £100,000, three quotes. On paper, at least, this is not a case of the council handing over £2.4 million and hoping for the best.

The same is true of the public-benefit side of the bargain. Clause 8.9 says the recipient must provide “a strong community offer for residents including but not limited to swimming lessons, aqua fit, family swim, lane swimming and rehabilitation sessions.” Clause 8.10 requires the works to bring the pool into compliance with the latest PWTAG standards. The agreement also requires monthly participation and visit data, broken down by age, gender, deprivation decile, ethnicity and disability. The council has plainly tried to make this more than a cheque for building works. It is attempting to tie the grant to measurable community use.

Yet one obvious political safeguard was considered and then dropped. The report says officers looked at whether the agreement should include provisions for the council to be consulted on swimming admission prices, or requirements for the Trust to control or benchmark charges. “This was not progressed.” That is a telling passage. Because one of the obvious public worries in a deal like this is not simply whether the pool reopens, but whether a publicly supported pool could still become too expensive for many residents. Officers say the Trust’s charity status and long local track record count against that risk. Even so, the papers make clear that formal price controls are not part of the deal now heading to Cabinet.

There is also a clawback regime, and again the principle is sensible. The report says clauses 26.5 to 26.17 are intended to give the council “as a last resort the ability to claim back the funding or a proportion of it”, tapering over ten years so that the Trust still has an incentive to keep the pool running if finances come under pressure. The draft agreement sets out the taper: 100% before the end of year one, then 90%, 80%, 70%, 60%, 50%, 50%, 40%, 40% and 30% before the end of year ten. It also says a Land Registry restriction will be added to protect the council. All of that looks like the right sort of thinking when public money is going into somebody else’s property.

But this is where the criticism needs to be stated carefully. It is perfectly normal for a draft agreement going to Cabinet to contain blanks for the final date, execution blocks and completion details. The report itself says that, subject to Cabinet approval, the draft agreement “will be presented to The Sports Trust to agree.” So no, the mere fact that the document is still dated “————” or that the “Commencement Date” still refers to “completion date ————————————–” is not, by itself, some smoking gun. Those are the sort of matters one would expect to be completed after the decision.

The more serious point is narrower than that. Some of the remaining placeholders appear to touch operational terms, not just administrative completion points. Clause 3 says payments are to be made up to the instalment amounts in Schedule 2, and that claims must be submitted in accordance with Schedule 2. Yet Schedule 2 still says “[Funder will make Grant payments OR Recipient may request Grant payments]” and then leaves “[DETAILS]”. Clause 4 says the grant may only be used in accordance with “the agreed budget set out in Schedule 3”, yet Schedule 3 is still shown as “[DETAILS]”, including the section for “Other funding”. And while the report explains that clauses 26.5 to 26.17 are meant to provide tapered clawback over ten years, clause 26.5 in the draft still says the council may reclaim “x amount of the Capital Grant”. In other words, the problem is not that the agreement is still a draft. The problem is that parts of the draft which appear to matter operationally are still not visibly populated in the published version.

There is a second drafting tension too. The report says The Sports Trust remains “the property owner and responsible for the building and land.” But clause 16.3 of the draft agreement says: “Assets will be owned by the Funder unless otherwise agreed in writing by the Funder.” Clause 16.6 then says that, unless otherwise agreed, the recipient must pay to the funder the proportion of sale proceeds equivalent to the proportion of the asset’s purchase or development cost funded by the grant. That may all be legally workable. It may be aimed at grant-funded assets rather than the site as a whole. But it is exactly the sort of point that needs to be nailed down cleanly before the agreement is finalised, because the politics here are already sensitive enough without fuzzy language over who owns what once the public money has gone in.

The timetable also deserves a raised eyebrow. The Sports Trust’s October funding request asked for the release of funds by December 2025 so that the pool could reopen by July 2026 “without the need for alternative financing which would cause delay and increased costs.” Cabinet is only now due to decide on 25 March 2026. The report says the Trust still appears confident of delivery by July 2026, but also says there remains “an elevated risk of slippage” because of the condition of the building and the complexity of modernising an ageing pool. That is not fatal to the scheme. But it does mean the cheerful version of events is not the whole story.

Then there is subsidy control. The report says officers have assessed that the new grant agreement “would meet the general definition of a subsidy.” It argues the arrangement can still be supported because it focuses on community swimming rather than broader commercial leisure provision, addresses a shortfall in district swimming provision, and excludes any ongoing revenue grant. It also says that, after Cabinet approval, the final agreement will be assessed against the Subsidy Control Act 2022 and a decision made on whether to refer it for inclusion on the CMA database. Again, that does not kill the proposal. But it does tell you this is not some routine grant quietly drifting through committee. It is a substantial public intervention that officers know needs a legal footing.

The funding source sharpens the point. The report says the £2.4 million provision in the 2026/27 capital programme will be funded by £1.5 million from section 106 contributions and £0.9 million from capital receipts. So this is not airy-fairy aspiration money. It is real public capital being directed into a project that residents will understandably support in principle, but which still raises tough questions about ownership, control, affordability and long-term risk.

The honest conclusion is not that the scheme is doomed, nor that Cabinet would be mad to back it. The honest conclusion is that the council has assembled a credible public-interest case for helping reopen the pool, while also exposing itself to a very obvious line of criticism: a large public subsidy, for a building it does not own, on terms that are mostly there but not all visibly finished in the published draft. The strongest version of the argument against the deal is not that the paperwork contains blanks. It is that some of the blanks still appear to matter. And the strongest version of the argument for the deal is that the council can finish those terms properly before entry and still rescue a facility that much of the district plainly does not want to lose. That, in the end, is the Cabinet test on 25 March.

The Shepway Vox Team

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