The entrance to Harborne Baths, now being demolished so it can be replaced by a brand-new facility. Photograph by Andy Mabbett

There has been a lot of fuss about swimming pool facilities in Birmingham – with the controversy over Birmingham’s proposed and the state of Moseley Road Baths, the Edwardian swimming baths that currently has only one of its two major pools open.

The City Council is keen to see the new pool built, but due largely to problems with its budget deficit, this flagship facility won’t be completed until after the London Olympics in 2012. And Birmingham news blog the Stirrer has reported that it will be scrapped.

Getting to the numbers
I started this investigation by asking whether or not Birmingham compared badly with other comparable cities for swimming pool provision. I made a pretty crude calculation that it did, but that assessment was (as I admitted at the time) hardly reliable.

Now I think I’m able to look in a lot more detail at the state of swimming pool provision in the city, thanks, largely to one very detailed source of information – the Active Places database.

Sadly the database is not easy to access, but a while ago I stumbled across a report online that was compiled for the Amateur Swimming Association. The report was compiled by the Sports Industry Research Centre at Sheffield Hallam University and is available here. It uses Active Places data and compares it with population. As you can see, it is a long read and is marked ‘Confidential’. However, it’s been made available for public consumption on the ASA’s West Region website. Furthermore, it uses data that is publicly available – from Active Places, the Active People survey and the 2001 Census. What is interesting and valuable is the analysis and comparison between these separate data sets. I’ve been able to find out much of the information that I need to understand – in considerable detail – how the UK’s second largest city lags behind the rest of the country in its provision of swimming pools.

Is swimming pool demand important?
The ASA-commissioned report says swimming is the UK’s second most popular physical activity, after walking. Sport England (the organisation responsible for trying to increase sport participation in England) believes swimming has the highest latent demand of any sport. To put it another way, 13 per cent of those surveyed for the Active People survey who hadn’t been swimming said they’d be interested in taking up the activity in the future. For that reason, swimming was highlighted by Gordon Brown’s government as a key sport to increase participation in the UK – which is why it committed £130m to offer free swimming to all by 2012. So the message, from the last government at least, is clear: we need to increase swimming participation to increase participation in sport. I won’t start to look at whether that’s a good thing, but you can look here for a good argument.

The statistics

According to the ASA’s report, there is a close correlation between the provision of swimming pools and demand for swimming – this shows that where swimming provision is highest so is demand. (There is also evidence that there’s plenty of supply, but the report seems unsure about these figures).
Have a look at this visualisation for the regional data:

By clicking on the visualisation you should be able to see a correlation between demand and supply. In the top left-hand corner click on facility m2/1000 (this shows the amount swimming surface area per 1000 people). Now click on participation rate – and the map looks remarkably similar, with the same dark areas, while the West Midlands is one of the lightest regions. In other words, where there’s the most availability of swimming – in the South West, South East and in East, there are more people swimming.

Now let’s look at the West Midlands – one of the worst regions for supply and demand.

I haven’t been able to produce a good visualisation of these figures, because there isn’t an appropriate map yet, but this spreadsheet does the job:

As you can see, it’s Birmingham that’s the worst offender, in fact it’s significantly worse than other regions within the West Midlands, itself one of the worst regions in the country. The report says that, in order to meet the regional figure for 14.85 facility sq m per 1,000 people Birmingham needs another 2.25 Olympic-sized swimming pools. That’s still some way off the national figure of 17.67.

Of course there’s a health warning over all of this. The report does point out that, even in Birmingham, supply is able to meet current demand – which sort of contradicts the evidence that superior supply leads to more demand.
However, what we can say with reasonable confidence is that with doubts over the 50 metre pool and the only pool to have been rebuilt so far is Harborne, it seems Birmingham does indeed have a long way to go before it has anything like the supply of pools some other parts of England enjoy.