Health and Sport Committee, 18 Jun 2008

Meeting date: Wednesday, June 18, 2008

Official Report 196KB pdf

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Petition

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Ice Rinks (PE1138)

The next item on the agenda is consideration of PE1138. The petition, which was lodged on 4 April 2008 by Erica Woollcombe, calls on the Scottish Parliament to urge the Scottish Government to take all necessary steps to ensure the continued provision of local ice rinks and to recognise their benefits in promoting health and wellbeing.

This is the committee's first consideration of the petition. Our papers contain a briefing from the Scottish Parliament information centre and a note by the clerk setting out possible options. Do members have any comments?

I understand the petitioner's concerns, given the length of time that the ice rink in her area will be out of use, but this is a matter for the local authority, which is after all responsible for the rink's refurbishment. I warn of the danger of becoming involved in issues surrounding individual facilities in different local authority areas. As the issue of facilities will arise in our inquiry into pathways into sport, we should note the petition in that regard, but I do not think that we have a duty to intervene directly in a matter that is the responsibility of a democratically elected local authority.

I disagree. The petitioner has highlighted the example of her ice rink in Aberdeen, but the petition itself is worded much more broadly than that. We could well ignore the local issue but, as the substance of the petition fits quite well into our pathways into sport inquiry, we should consider it as part of the evidence in that respect.

The lack of a planned maintenance programme clearly resulted in Aberdeen City Council having to take the decision that it took. Anything that we can do to encourage local authorities to have planned maintenance programmes would be useful, so that others do not get into similar situations. In this case, the council had no option because of the state of the facility, but the council should never have reached the point of having to close the rink down.

We should consider the terms of the petition, which are broad; I do not want to concentrate on the Aberdeen example and on what the council there has or has not done.

Rhoda Grant and I have both been members of the Public Petitions Committee, and anyone who has been a member will know that the committee prefers to consider general points without getting into specific details. We should therefore await further responses to the Public Petitions Committee's request for information, as that will allow us to address the general issues in a more coherent way. I presume that the Public Petitions Committee will have asked for further information from central Government, from the Convention of Scottish Local Authorities and from a variety of other agencies. We should therefore wait until September before considering the petition, by which time we will have received all those responses.

The petition seeks to

"ensure the continued provision of local ice rinks"—

an issue that is obviously outwith our control—

"and to recognise the benefit these play in promoting health and wellbeing."

Those benefits are clear.

I draw the committee's attention to page 2 of the briefing from the Scottish Parliament information centre, in which there is consideration of an issue that we might be able to influence. The second paragraph says that 90 per cent of facilities had experienced an increase in overhead costs. We all know that the major contributor to that will be energy costs. The paragraph continues by mentioning measures that are being taken, such as

"improving building insulation, water recycling plans, installing solar panels, and new and more efficient plants"

using, for example, combined heat and power. However, the paragraph ends by saying that

"such measures in themselves require funding and the survey found that only 40% of respondent rinks confirmed they had secured such funding."

People are trying to reduce their overheads and be more efficient. I am not entirely sure where the funding for ice rinks comes from, but if it comes from Government I wonder whether we could ask the Cabinet Secretary for Finance and Sustainable Growth whether assistance could be offered.

From the briefing, it seems that some ice rinks are owned by local authorities, some are privately owned and some are owned by clubs or members. That may be a difficulty.

At the end of the SPICe briefing, it says:

"The Royal Caledonian Curling Club has advised that, following the survey discussed above, it is developing a facilities strategy."

Should we wait until we hear what the club has to say?

To try to get a picture of the difficulties faced by sports facilities, a national audit of all sports facilities was completed by sportscotland in 2006. That followed on from the report on the audit of swimming facilities—"The Ticking Time Bomb" report. We therefore have a detailed picture of the problems faced by a whole range of sports facilities across the country. Support for such facilities is a general issue, and the national audit identified a deficit of around £2 billion in investment in sports facilities.

The petition highlights the specific issue of ice rinks, which was addressed in the national audit. However, the arguments in favour of further investment apply equally to a range of facilities—such as indoor football arenas, running tracks and gymnasiums. The pathways into sport inquiry could consider general issues relating to sports facilities, although we should bear it in mind that a national audit has already been done.

Joe FitzPatrick will know more about this than any of us. Ice rinks are not just a general sporting facility; they are more complex. They consume huge amounts of energy, so there is an issue about heat and power. Few rinks genuinely use the heat generated from the ice facility to promote another facility—for example, a few rinks use that as a heat source for a swimming facility. Given that, the SPICe paper is a bit of a mixter-maxter—this is not a criticism of SPICe—because it talks about ice hockey and ice dance at the same time as talking about, as the convener just said, the Royal Caledonian Curling Club, which has a completely different requirement.

As I understand it, one of the great problems of the economics of ice rinks is to balance the downtime required to produce ice suitable for curling with the downtime required to produce ice that is suitable for simply ice skating or ice hockey. A big economic factor gets woven into that involving the availability of the ice and the amount that people are prepared to pay. I do not disagree with Michael Matheson that we need to consider this issue, but we must be clear that the provision of ice and the standards that are required for different uses hugely complicate the ability to satisfy demand and the economics of running ice rinks.

This is an important issue, particularly in light of the evidence that has been presented us. I wonder whether we can take an approach that has not been used in the committee since I returned to Parliament, which is to appoint a reporter to have a look at the issue. I am slightly surprised that we have not considered, as part of our general inquiry into pathways into sport, the process of having a subsidiary report on the petition that considers the issue of ice rinks—although I presume that that could be included under the briefing paper's option 7c): "take an alternative approach."

Perhaps we will come to a particular view. The "Background" section of the briefing paper states that the Public Petitions Committee has

"agreed to seek responses on the issues raised from the Scottish Government, Scottish Ice Rinks Association, Aberdeen City Council, Perth and Kinross Council, Moray Council and North Ayrshire Council, and to pass the responses to the Health and Sport Committee."

I suggest that we wait for those responses, and then decide whether we can absorb them into our inquiry into pathways into sport. I comprehend that there are specific issues with regard to ice and expensive maintenance in ice rinks, but we know that there are problems with sports facilities of all kinds. I thank Michael Matheson for advising that Audit Scotland has produced its evidence. If we wait, we can come back to the issue, which would be a satisfactory way forward. Do members agree to that?

Members indicated agreement.