What’s going on with Medway’s swimming instructors?
Is Medway Council making redundancies? Plus Medway's stations get busier, a councillor saves their job, St Mary Hoo parish drama, news in brief, and more
Is Medway Council making experienced Swimming Instructors redundant? Some instructors seem to think so, but Medway Council says otherwise. We’ve been trying to get to the bottom of what’s happening. Further down, we have a bumper edition of news, with some exciting rail data, an update on Cllr Lauren Edwards keeping her job, drama at St Mary Hoo parish council, news in brief, and more.
What’s going on with Medway’s swimming instructors?
A couple of weeks ago, a reader informed us that Medway Council was making six Swimming Instructors redundant in January. While it is well known that Medway is in a fairly dire financial position, there has been no suggestion that any staff members were likely to be made redundant to make savings.
So what exactly is happening?
As ever, things tend to be murky and badly communicated.
Posts started appearing on social media in the last few days with the same story: Swimming instructors, particularly the more experienced ones, were set to lose their jobs.
Tracking down more information on this proved challenging. Efforts to reach any of the impacted instructors failed, and anyone we managed to speak to within the Medway Sport team told us we’d need to speak to the Medway Council press team instead.
So we did that and received an awful lot of words:
“The council’s Medpay programme, currently underway for all council staff, aims to provide greater opportunities for career progression and pay consistency to attract and retain a skilled and talented workforce. As part of this, the former Swimming Instructor role will no longer exist as the work is included within the preexisting Sports Officer or Senior Sports officer role giving our staff opportunities to develop new skills.
All current Swimming Instructors will be offered the opportunity to amend their contract to continue working for us in the role of a Sports Officer or Senior Sports Officer and consultation will be undertaken with relevant staff and suitable options offered as part of the process.
Medway Council’s extensive programme of swimming lessons, offered across Medway Council’s sports centres has grown significantly in recent years, expanding further following the recent opening of our new family-friendly centre at Cozenton Park, and will continue to be at the forefront of the service offered to Medway residents. Ensuring our children and local people are confident in the water is something we are very proud of and our lessons remain hugely popular with local people.”
At face value, this doesn’t sound too bad. A review is underway to rationalise job roles and salaries across Medway Council, so if this is a simple matter of just moving employees onto new contracts, what’s the issue? How does that result in at least six swimming instructors believing they are being made redundant?
The key section might be the amended contracts and moving their role from straightforward Swimming Instructors to Sports Officers or Senior Sports Officers. The Sports Officer roles come with considerably more responsibility, particularly at the more senior level the longstanding instructors may have found themselves moving to.
Responsibilities for the Senior Sports Officer role from a 2024 job description include:
Taking day-to-day responsibility for the effective financial governance of the centre as required by the centre’s management team.
Identifying opportunities to increase participation throughout the centre and manage expenditure, and putting forward suggestions to the centre management
Assisting the centre management to ensure the centre facilities are in excellent condition at all times including all cleanliness and decoration meets the agreed standards required ready for use by customers.
While some existing Swimming Instructors may be happy with the extra responsibility, presumably not all will necessarily want to take on financial, project management, or cleaning duties.
As a result, it seems likely that a number of Swimming Instructors will opt for redundancy from a job they love because Medway Council are proposing to change its scope dramatically.
There has even been some suggestion that forcing the employees from one job role to another with entirely different terms and responsibilities has shades of ‘fire and rehire’. We put this to Medway Council, asking them to confirm that this is not what is happening, and received this entirely reassuring response:
“In accordance with Council policy, the next step is to discuss with staff through the formal consultation process.”
So it appears at best that Medway Council have failed to communicate the changes to their employees if they now believe they are being made redundant. At worst, they are changing the scope of their contracts so vastly that at least six Swimming Instructors don’t believe they can continue in the role.
It comes at a slightly odd time when Medway Council recently announced that Cozenton Park Sports Centre had come in £1.5m under budget and that this money would be invested into sports centres across Medway. Perhaps they should invest some of the money into their staff or at least in learning how to communicate with them.
We’d love to speak to anyone with further knowledge of what is going on. If that’s you, email us via hello AT localauthority DOT news - we’re happy to speak on or off the record.
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More passengers using Medway stations
It’s a big week for transport data nerds, as the Office of Rail and Road published their annual rail passenger statistics. Grander outlets might focus on the sexy numbers like the most or least visited stations, but this being Local Authority, we’re only interested in one thing: What’s going on at Medway’s rail stations?
The headline data is that all seven Medway rail stations have seen an uptick in passengers, from a modest 7% in Rochester to a whopping 40% in Halling, where all of the newbuilds around St Andrew’s Park and Peters Village are presumably having an impact. While figures for all stations haven’t quite returned to pre-pandemic levels, all are getting very close.
Gillingham - 2,342,402 (6,417 per day) - Up 10%
Chatham - 2,172,512 (5,952 per day) - Up 8%
Rochester - 1,907,920 (5,227 per day) - Up 7%
Rainham - 1,529,926 (4,192 per day) - Up 10%
Strood - 1,054,484 (2,889 per day) - Up 7%
Halling - 86,704 (238 per day) - Up 40%
Cuxton - 55,970 (153 per day) - Up 15%
The order of the stations remains the same as last year, not that you’d necessarily expect wild year-to-year swings for the most part. The only slight change is in the destination data. While the largest number of journeys from Gillingham, Chatham, and Rochester continues to be to London Victoria, these have now been joined by Rainham, which previously went for London Bridge instead. Strood and Halling continue to have St Pancras as their primary destination, while Cuxton remains stubbornly local, with passengers mostly only heading to Strood.
Cllr Edwards attends a council meeting
Two weeks ago, we raised the rather intriguing possibility that new Rochester and Strood MP Lauren Edwards might be disqualified as a councillor because she hadn’t attended a meeting in nearly six months.
This risked derailing the choreographed plan for all three councillors elected as MPs to resign together in January, triggering February by-elections, as it would have triggered a January election for Edwards. Given that Cllr Tristan Osborne, one of her ward colleagues, is also soon to resign, this would have potentially meant voters in Rochester East would be trudging to the polls twice as many months.
Happily, Cllr Edwards turned up to her first Medway Council meeting in 175 days as a substitute for last week’s Health and Wellbeing Board, maintaining her councillor role with a full nine days before she would have been removed from office.
Now we can all get back to the important work of speculating exactly when she and the other two councillors turned MPs will formally resign and trigger by-elections in Rochester East and Gillingham South.
Parish councils are weird latest
It’s all kicking off in St Mary Hoo on the peninsula, where four parish councillors have resigned in protest at the Fenn Bell Inn receiving planning permission to build 44 homes on their land.
Parish councillors being unhappy about planning isn’t new, nor is the odd one resigning in protest. The remarkable thing is that the entire St Mary Hoo Parish Council only has five councillors. With four resigning, just one remains.
All hail Bill Budd, the former Vice Chair, who now makes up the entirety of St Mary Hoo Parish Council.
Now, stick with us, as this is where we start to get into the absurdity of the parish council system.
When a vacancy arises on a parish council, the default isn’t to trigger a by-election. This only happens if ten electors within the parish write to the primary authority (in this case, Medway Council) and request one. Unsurprisingly, this often doesn’t happen. Getting ten people to care about something like a parish council vacancy is unusual, let alone when there are four of them and a total electorate within the parish of 193. During the last parish elections in St Mary Hoo, councillors found themselves elected receiving as few as 30 votes.
There has been no sign that any by-elections in St Mary Hoo have been requested. If they had, Medway Council should have displayed the election notices by now. This has not happened.
This is where things get really silly.
If no by-election is requested, the vacancies can be filled by co-option, which is effectively the parish council choosing who they want to fill the role. Of course, the entire council is now one man, so Cllr Budd quite possibly holds all of the power in St Mary Hoo right now.
In brief
🏘️ Planning permission is being sought for 60 homes at Broomfield Farm in Hempstead. The field at the site is currently used for boot fairs.
🏫 Medway’s Conservative opposition has called in the decision on the next phase of the School Streets scheme. This temporarily delays the scheme's implementation while it is analysed and debated further.
🏗️ 296 flats in the centre of Rochester have been approved as part of the Ironmonger Yard development. The site, the junction of Star Hill and the High Street will see the homes, parking, commercial space, and crossing improvements as part of the plan.
🧑🏫 MidKent College in Gillingham has retained its Good rating from Ofsted. Additionally, its work with adults and students with high needs was rated Outstanding.
🏬 The lease of the Chatham Homebase store is now up for sale. If you’re interested in buying, be warned that the rent is nearly £550,000 per year.
🤷 Former Rochester and Strood MP Kelly Tolhurst, who is supposedly a serious politician who understands how democracy works, is promoting the Reform petition to call a General Election despite having lost one four months ago.
🗣️ ITV News has been asking how every MP intends to vote on the assisted dying bill in parliament later this week. So far, Rochester and Strood MP Lauren Edwards and Chatham and Aylesford MP Tristan Osborne have said they will support the bill, while Gillingham and Rainham MP Naushabah Khan has not revealed her position.
🕯️ Elsewhere, KMTV has been to speak to two Medway faith leaders about the bill. Perhaps unsurprisingly, they have different views.
🗳️ The key players of the 2014 Rochester and Strood by-election have reminisced about it for KentOnline. Mark Reckless seems to almost singlehandedly claim credit for Brexit in it.
More Authority
For our big weekend interview this week, we sat down with the Chief Executive of Chatham Historic Dockyard Trust, Richard Morsley. In a lengthy and wide-ranging conversation, we learn about his journey to the role, the role of the dockyard within the wider community, its use as a film location, the future of ropemaking, housing within the site, and most importantly, whether Chatham has beef with Portsmouth.
“It had not only a local impact but a global impact as well”
Richard Morsley is the Chief Executive of Chatham Historic Dockyard Trust. Steven met Richard in his office as dockyard ends its 2024 season. This was more challenging than expected and required the help of the friendly Dockyard team after Steven got lost in the vast space within the Dockyard walls. They discussed what brought Richard to Chatham Dockyard, Tom Cruise flying in via helicopter, the future of rope making, and whether a ship in Portsmouth should return to Chatham.
Footnotes
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Music that soundtracked the creation of this edition: Getting Into Knives by The Mountain Goats, More Break-Up Songs by New Starts, and Any Other City by Life Without Buildings.
A friend who is a parish councillor elsewhere in the country tells me that a parish council cannot exist with fewer than three members, so he thinks Cllr Budd probably doesn't have the power to co-opt in these circumstances.
St Mary Hoo Parish Council sounds worthy of a sitcom. Does Cllr Budd hold meetings with himself? 'Minutes of the last meeting. Agreed.' Sounds like if you raise your hand in greeting to him on the streets of St Mary Hoo, you'll be co-opted onto the Parish Council