FHDC Approves £2.42m Folkestone Sports Centre Grant to Reopen Pool

Folkestone & Hythe District Council’s Cabinet has unanimously approved a £2,421,250 capital grant to The Sports Trust to reopen Folkestone Sports Centre’s pool. The council’s case is that a one-off capital deal, with clawback protections, is better than years of ongoing subsidy. The awkward question has not gone away: taxpayers are funding major works on a site the council does not own.

For once, the real argument at Cabinet was not whether Folkestone needs its pool back. It plainly does. The argument was about how far the council should go, and on what terms, to help make that happen.

Yesterday, 25 March, Folkestone & Hythe District Council’s Cabinet unanimously approved all four recommendations in report C/25/92. That means it has now signed off a capital grant of £2,421,250 to The Sports Trust for works required to reopen Folkestone Sports Centre, approved the draft grant agreement, and authorised the Director of Housing and Operations to complete and enter into it.

In plain English, the council has committed more than £2.4 million of public capital money to getting Folkestone’s pool back open.

The constitutional point matters here, because councils have a habit of turning straightforward questions into procedural soup. But on this one the position is fairly clear. Full Council had already approved the money through the 2026/27 capital programme. Cabinet was therefore not being asked to invent a new pot of money on the night. It was being asked to approve the grant and the conditions attached to it.

The meeting then turned to the question many residents would have asked themselves. Why a grant rather than a loan?

Cllr Jeremy Speakman opened on exactly that point. Andrew Rush, Chief Officer Regulatory & Community Services (pictured), made clear that this was being structured as a capital grant rather than a revenue payment because the council wanted to be “free from future obligations”. He also made clear that section 106 money could not simply be used as a loan pot in the way some might imagine, that any loan would have had to be at market rates, and that the council did not want to start using its own already-allocated budgets in that way.

That answer fits the paperwork rather neatly. The report says an earlier proposal from The Sports Trust, submitted in August 2025, asked for £1.544 million in shortfall capital funding plus a four-year revenue grant of £200,000 a year. That proposal was rejected. The report says it did not specifically fund reopening the pool, created uncertainty around subsidy control compliance, and would have committed the council to ongoing revenue support it did not want to give.

The replacement proposal, submitted in October 2025, was narrower and therefore easier for the council to defend. It focused on the capital works needed to reopen the pool, changing areas and reception, together with roof repairs and solar works. That is how the current £2,421,250 figure was reached.

There is some history here too. Before the collapse of the former trust, the council had already been providing an annual revenue grant of £150,000. That arrangement was due to run until March 2026. So this was not a council stepping into the leisure world for the first time with a sudden burst of philanthropic enthusiasm. It had already been helping to prop up the old operation. What has changed is the model. Instead of continuing with annual support, the council has chosen a one-off capital intervention.

That is the heart of the political case. Pay once, with conditions, rather than keep writing cheques and hoping for the best.

Cllr Tim Prater pushed that case plainly. He made clear there were clawback clauses in case things go south and said the grant would enable The Sports Trust to open by July 2026, meaning residents and schools could once again use the pool. He also made clear that the council did not acquire Folkestone Sports Centre itself because it would not have been able to fund the refurbishment required, and that the district was fortunate The Sports Trust stepped in.

Again, that broadly matches the papers. The report describes the grant as “a significant financial commitment with risks”, but says those risks are to be managed through the agreement and due diligence. The draft grant agreement states that the intention of the “one-off capital grant” is to “remove the need for future requests for grant funding”. The protections are not trivial. Payments are retrospective. Procurement obligations are written in. There is open-book verification. The maximum sum does not rise just because costs do. And if the facility closes within ten years of opening, the council reserves the right to claw money back on a tapering scale, starting at 100 per cent in year one.

There is even a proposed Land Registry restriction to protect the council’s position as creditor.

So, on paper at least, this is not a blank cheque and a cheerful handshake.

But none of that removes the more awkward point. This is still a very large sum of public money going into a site the council does not own.

That is why this story has been politically live for months. The public benefit is easy enough to understand. The pool closed after the previous trust went into administration. Hythe Pool became the district’s only available public swimming baths. The council report says reopening Folkestone would improve swimming provision, support local schools and restore a longstanding community asset. The Sports Trust’s own funding request says failure to reopen would have “a significant detrimental impact on the health and wellbeing of the local community”, leaving people in a coastal town with nowhere to learn to swim.

All of that is real. But so is the control problem.

Taxpayers are being asked to fund major works on an asset owned by somebody else. That is why the conditions matter so much. It is why the clawback matters. It is why retrospective payment matters. And it is why the report openly acknowledges that for other works beyond the pool package, The Sports Trust will still need “other income streams including land sales”.

Cllr Jim Martin added the darker political backdrop. At one stage, while the site was up for sale with Christies, it looked as though a London-based property development company might be interested and that land at the back could have been used for housing, with the pool disappearing altogether. That is the alternative against which Cabinet members were judging the deal in front of them.

And that, in truth, is the real choice they made.

This was not a choice between a perfect public-sector solution and an imperfect private-sector one. It was a choice between an imperfect rescue package and the risk of losing the pool altogether. Cabinet has now chosen the rescue package.

Residents will probably take a fairly practical view of that. If the works are done, the pool reopens by July, schools are back in, and Folkestone once again has somewhere local for children to learn to swim, many will say the council did the sensible thing. If delays mount, costs spiral elsewhere on the site, or the facility runs into fresh trouble a few years down the line, this decision will be revisited very quickly and very angrily.

For now, though, the vote is taken, the money is approved, and the safeguards are on paper.

FHDC has placed its bet. It is betting that a tightly conditioned one-off grant is the least bad way to get a much-used community pool back. It is also betting that the public will accept putting millions into a privately owned site, so long as the result is visible, timely and durable.

By July, the town should know whether that bet was a smart rescue or merely a very expensive hope.

The Shepway Vox Team

Dissent is NOT a Crime