SOME of the city’s leisure centres battling to pay rocketing energy bills will be bailed out by the taxpayer amid demands to review the council’s “money pit” contract.

Worcester City Council has agreed to hand over up to £255,000 to Freedom Leisure, which runs Perdiswell Leisure Centre, St John’s Sports Centre and Nunnery Wood Sports Complex on its behalf, to help cover the soaring cost of gas and electricity.

Freedom Leisure revealed it expects bills to rise by as much as £620,000 in the next 12 months.

The deal was sealed despite criticism from councillors who labelled the council’s outsourced contract with Freedom Leisure a “money pit” and called for a ‘serious review’ into future agreements.

Cllr Andy Stafford said he was disappointed to see Freedom Leisure “behind the curve” on getting a grip of its energy bills ahead of the long-predicted rise in costs and accused bosses of “gambling” with taxpayer’s money in the hope that prices eventually dropped.

Cllr Adrian Gregson said the council needed to pick a point where it stopped “handing out money hand over fist” and said enough was enough.

“Freedom feels like a bit of a ‘money pit’ to me in the last few years, for one reason or another, not all their fault by any means, but that is the situation we are in,” he said during a meeting of the policy and resources committee on Tuesday (September 6).

“They are a national organisation and to say that they didn’t see some of this coming strikes me as a little bit naïve.

“There are issues across the country in the way in which Freedom Leisure deals with councils and everybody else and I think we need to be a bit more realistic in the way in which we have a relationship with them.”

Cllr Jabba Riaz said there was a serious case to review the council’s deals with Freedom Leisure and believed some of the ‘nuclear options’ – such as bringing the running of the leisure centres back under the control of the council or closing facilities to save money – were “real possibilities” and may turn into ‘sensible options’ in the future.

“It does feel that the buck keeps coming back to the council,” he said.