The Royal Borough of Windsor & Maidenhead is inviting residents to share their views on the borough’s current leisure services, and facilities, to see if they are giving people what they want and need.
An online survey launched today (16 November) and runs for a month, will help the council better understand residents’ exercise habits and if they can easily access their local sports and wellbeing facilities. The questions are designed so that people’s responses are anonymous.
This public feedback will assist the council in pinpointing any barriers preventing people from being more physically active and using local leisure centres and other facilities such as green spaces, to consider solutions to overcome these.
The council will use the survey’s key findings, along with feedback from focus groups as well as stakeholders, to inform recommendations for the borough’s future leisure provision. These recommendations are due to discussed next spring.
Councillor Ross McWilliams, Cabinet Member for Housing, Sport and Leisure, and Community Engagement, said: “The feedback from this survey will support the refresh of our Sport and Leisure Strategy, which has the core objective to get more residents, more active, more often, leading to more healthy communities. The strategy’s emerging themes are to promote and champion existing clubs to help grow their participation, maximise the use and accessibility of existing facilities to enable clubs to expand, and to identify gaps in leisure and sports facilities provision to explore opportunities to address these.
“This short survey is also about understanding why some of the borough’s groups or communities don’t use the existing facilities, so that we can design future services to make sure everyone can easily access them.
“The council’s strategic plan for sport and physical activity is aligned to our corporate goal of creating thriving communities and inspiring places. This includes specific targets for increasing physical activity levels, particularly among those groups where activity is likely to be lower. We want to help them better use the borough’s leisure centres and what they offer along with other facilities such as parks – all of which boost health and wellbeing.
“The questions in the survey will also consider the cost of existing services and the accessibility and types of existing travel routes to them.”
The survey, which closes at midnight on 14 December, should take approximately ten minutes to complete.t is available online at www.rbwm.gov.uk/consultations and via posters in leisure centres using a QR code.
Public-access computers are available at all local libraries, where staff will be happy to help residents get online if needed. If paper copies of the survey are required instead, these are also available from libraries on request.
The borough’s Facebook, Twitter, and Nextdoor social media platforms will also have links to the survey, as well as the Residents’ News e-newsletter.