Labour MP Meg Hillier hits back in Portsmouth swimming pool argument

Stephen Morgan MP and Dame Meg Hillier MP, chair of the public accounts committee, hit out at Portsmouth City Council last week over the delayed Bransbury Leisure Centre and swimming pool.

In a letter to The News Dame Meg said she was ‘interested’ to read council leader Gerald Vernon-Jackson’s suggestion that ‘almost no councils’ in the country are building swimming pools.

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‘On this, he’s just plain wrong,’ she wrote. ‘My own council has built a new leisure centre, including a six-lane pool and a leisure pool which opened in 2021 in my constituency of Hackney South and Shoreditch.

‘As chair of Parliament’s Public Accounts Committee for the past eight years, I have scrutinised a large number of publicly funded projects. Too often over-optimism at the ideas stage means that the money doesn’t stack up and the project is delayed or fails.

‘Hackney’s Britannia Leisure Centre cost around £54m. Cllr Vernon-Jackson is promising a cut price £16m including most of the same facilities.

‘My Portsmouth friends don’t deserve a cut-price shed. If Labour-run Hackney council can fund a top-class facility in spite of years of government cuts to its budget, then why can’t Portsmouth City Council?

‘Stephen Morgan is right to be concerned about the lack of imagination and ambition the council has for the city I grew up in. Pompey deserves better.’

In response, Cllr Vernon-Jackon said he is ‘sorry’ that Dame Meg ‘has been so badly misinformed’.

‘Having unaffordable pipe dreams and telling residents these are possible is a bad habit that many politicians fall into, and this seems to be the case with Labour’s Dame Meg Hillier,’ he added.

‘The London pool and sports centre was planned and built before energy costs tripled and heating swimming pools is incredibly expensive. London receives massively more financial support from the government than Portsmouth.

‘Finding the extra £38m Dame Meg Hillier says we need is impossible within Portsmouth’s budget.

‘For politicians to suggest unfunded pipe dreams which cannot be delivered does no service to local residents as it means we would get no new pool, leisure centre or GP surgery.

‘One thing I have tried to instil in Portsmouth City Council is to be financially sensible and to live within our means. This means that when Labour-led Southampton and Conservative-led Hampshire councils are both facing the threat of bankruptcy, this is not the case in Portsmouth.’