Oasis Leisure Centre planning application delayed until July

By Jamie Hill - 28 April 2025

PoliticsSport

Plans for the Oasis Leisure Centre will not come before Swindon Borough Council's planning committee until July according to The Labour Group on the council.

The planning application being proposed by SevenCapital was due to be discussed in the spring but was orginally delayed until the end of March after an application was made by campaign group Save Oasis Swindon to make the sports hall an asset of community value.

The council had until 26 March to make a judgement on this and the bid ended up not being successful.

But now the proposals have been delayed again as the campaign group has put forward another bid, this time to make the entire leisure centre, including the sports hall, an asset of community value.

The council has now until 17 June to make a judgement on this latest application.

The borough council itself has not confirmed whether this will delay the planning application being heard but now the Labour Group on the council has said it will not be heard until the July planning committee meeting.

A spokesperson for the Labour Group on Swindon Borough Council said: "The Oasis will reopen. It will come to the planning committee in July and work can, if it gets planning consent, start this year.

"The campaigners, although hugely passionate, haven’t ever demonstrated any other viable and affordable route to get the Oasis open, and haven’t explained why it has to be a carbon copy of what was there in 1976.

"We need to get an Oasis for the next 50 years, not one for the last 50 years which ended up shutting down."

Neil Robinson, who heads up the Save Oasis Swindon campaign, said: “They basically turned down our application for the ACV for the hall, with reasons which didn't really stand up.

“So we've put in a fresh application which encompasses the whole Oasis Leisure Centre, pool and hall.

“They argued that the Oasis had closed in the first lockdown in March 2020 and temporarily reopened, but this doesn't really stand up. (The ACV Criteria is a building has to have been in use within the last five years).

“As part of our new submission for the whole centre, I've included my own personal tickets showing I was using an open Oasis in both August and September 2020. We have also provided evidence that a local gymnastics group were using the Hall in October 2020. These dates are all under five years ago.

“The Council and SevenCapital also tried to blame the poor structural condition of the Hall, but no independent survey of the condition, or an assessment of how much a new rebuild would cost has ever been provided.

“If approved it would give the community a greater influence in what a future Oasis would offer visitors.

“It also adds further pressure on the decision makers to include a Hall in the new Oasis.”

The Oasis Leisure Centre has been closed since November 2020 after operators GLL stated it was no longer viable.

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