Why Sheffield City Trust has called quits on Sheffield’s leisure and entertainment venues after three decades

It follows years of financial struggles at the Trust, also known as SCT, over which time the council has kept it afloat with millions in taxpayer money.

The Trust has run the city’s major facilities – including Sheffield Arena, City Hall, Ponds Forge and the English Institute of Sport – for more than 30 years.

But it will give them all back to the council on a provisional date of August 31, 2024, the council said.

The council will fund a £4 million pension deficit as well as a £7 million funding gap to keep it going until then and “ensure a smooth transition” to a new provider, meaning it will be mostly “business as usual” for now and there are no plans to close venues or make big staff redundancies at this point.

The situation was discussed in a scrutiny meeting today.

When responding to a question about whether it was “always going to end this way” and whether the council should have known that and acted sooner, Ryan Keyworth, director of finance at the council, said: “This is a 30 year old structure that is trying to deliver something in 2022.

“There aren’t many other places that run their leisure facilities like this any more. Leisure facilities tend to be run at larger scale. For example, Greenwich Leisure which was the trust set up to run the leisure facilities after the London Olympic Games. They now run dozens of different leisure facilities all over the country and they developed a scale of business that allows them to use their overheads across a large number of operations.

“Sheffield City Trust tried to do that, about 13 years ago, to set up a trust called Sheffield International Venues which allowed it to bid for external contracts, some of which it did but it didn’t get very many.

“That expansion didn’t achieve the scale the council and the trustees hoped it would.

“The challenges the Trust has today though are in some ways the same as the council has got.

“The facilities are tired, they need renovation, they need backlog maintenance addressing – that’s what the leisure strategy is all about. If you have got facilities that are tired it is difficult to make money from them but the council and the Trust between us haven’t been able to find the resources, the money, to put into those facilities to bring them back up to standard.

“We need a fresh start and that is what this is about.”

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Some venues were set to go out to tender over the next couple of years anyway.

A council report this week confirmed that the Trust would not bid for those contracts and that it was going to also hand back all of the other facilities it manages.

Sheffield Council’s plans for the future of facilities

Sheffield Council is in the process of putting the facilities out to tender with a £100 million investment over the next 30 years.

It is not yet known who will take over the facilities from then.