Leeds City Council’s sport and active recreation service is committed to providing sporting opportunities which achieve equality of access and choice. We aim to provide all services in a way that is fair to everyone and not to disadvantage any group or individual.
We recognise that accessibility is a major issue for disabled people and we have been making a number of improvements to our services and facilities to increase accessibility. We have incorporated good practice and guidance from many organisations, including the Equality and Human Rights Commission.
Leeds City Council has developed a new single Equality and Diversity Scheme for 2008 – 2011, which covers all our legal duties. The Scheme includes our Disability, Race and Gender Equality Schemes. For further information on this please click on the link below:
Link: Equality and diversity scheme and policy
Our commitment is demonstrated by our approach and the improvements we have made in recent years include:
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Our customer care approach to disabled people. We want to ensure that all our disabled customers have a positive experience when using our centres and that we work actively to attract more disabled people to use our range of facilities. We invest in customer care and equity awareness training for our staff which helps to ensure that staff are aware of access issues when serving disabled customers.
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Our ‘inclusive statement’ reflects our customer care approach. The service is committed to encouraging people of any ability or background to take part in our activities and we want our customers to make us aware of any specific requirements they may have.
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A large number of our leisure facilities are now largely accessible by disabled people, including:
-John Charles centre for sport which includes 4 buildings (stadium, bowls and athletics, tennis and aquatics centres);
- Leeds sailing and activity centre
- John Smeaton leisure centre
- Rothwell leisure centre
- Aireborough leisure centre
- Scott Hall leisure centre
- New centres opening at Armley (May 2010) and Morley (summer 2010)
Improvements vary across each of the sites but generally have involved the installation of lifts, provision of all-inclusive disabled changing cubicles, toilets on all floors, automatic doors both internally and externally, lowered reception counters, internal and external ramps and disabled parking bays to name a few. All the leisure centres have lifting devices for accessing the swimming pools with some sites having the addition of height adjustable changing beds and transfer hoists.
- The new builds at Armley and Morley will have ‘Changing Places’ standard toilets and changing areas which will include hoists and changing beds, plus a tracking system in both the wetside and dryside changing rooms.
Armley leisure centre will also have its own purpose-built hydrotherapy pool to allow increased community access to this much needed facility.
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Recent new builds have all incorporated the recommended disability provision and where possible has exceeded the minimum requirement.
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We aim to anticipate what customers with different disabilities may need in order to access our services. We consult disabled groups in the community and have carried out equality impact assessments. Consultation with our local disabled users and religious groups has provided valuable information on the specific needs of these groups which can not be gained from standard building regulations. The feedback from these groups on our recent new builds will help to further improve our future facilities with regards to the design of toilets, changing rooms, lifts and signage etc.
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Activities for disabled people. We have developed a booklet for disabled people that gives details of the sport and recreation services we provide. This is distributed widely to disabled groups, hospitals, GPs and leisure centres. For further information please click on the link below:
Link: Sport and active recreation programme for disabled people.
Committed to continuous improvement -
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We will continually strive to improve the physical accessibility of our leisure facilities.
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We will identify further action required in the medium to long term as and when resources allow to ensure that the service continues to improve in terms of provision for disabled people.
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We will establish, through our performance management framework, that we have an effective system of monitoring and evaluation to ensure progress is being made in addressing the actions required in relation to equality and, in particular, access to our services.