The awards served as a platform to highlight the exceptional efforts undertaken by the organisation and its colleague teams across the regions they serve at promoting community health and wellbeing, and to celebrate the individual achievements by the leisure and cultural venues.
Tenbury Community Pool, operated by Freedom Leisure, one of the UK’s leading charitable not-for-profit leisure trusts, came out on top by winning Environmental Performance of the Year 2023 - 2024, beating off competition from over 120 centres in England and Wales.
Working in partnership with trustees of Tenbury Community Pool, Freedom Leisure has embraced its commitment to protect the environment with a range of innovative measures to reduce energy consumption.
Coupled with this, staff at the pool strived to engage with every single customer and stakeholder to ensure they were aligned with the strategy to reduce energy use and to play their part, both from an environmental perspective but also to ensure the sustainability of community swimming facilities such as Tenbury Community Pool.
This has resulted in massive energy savings:
- 34% year on year reduction of electricity usage at the facility. Translating to a reduction of 38,000kwh of electricity, enough electricity to power 13 UK homes for an entire year or enough power to fully charge 760 electric vehicles.
- 41% reduction in gas usage since 2021/22 which was 260,000kwh of gas, enough to heat 21 UK homes for an entire year or enough gas to power 35,000 pizza ovens for an hour which would produce an estimated 17.5 million pizzas!
Close management and monitoring of usage has been a shared objective for Freedom Leisure and Tenbury Community Pool for a number of years. At Tenbury Community Pool the team have a strong culture for managing and reducing usage, ensuring electrical equipment is off, energy saving equipment is working and in use such as the pool cover.
Rob Tyler, Area Manager for Freedom Leisure said: “I am delighted for Tenbury Community Pool to win this award. It is a testament to the hard work the team put in each and every day ensuring that energy usage is monitored. We are very grateful to Tenbury Community Pool and their trustees for their partnership support which included securing external funding for energy saving measures, such as renewable energy, improved glazing, energy efficient boilers and solar panel installation that are now supplying 5% of the facilities electricity demands.”
Adrian Taylor, Chairman of Tenbury Community Pool said: “The Trustees are proud of the two awards in recognition of the progress that has been made towards our vision of providing an energy efficient and sustainable leisure facility for Tenbury Wells and it’s wider community. We thank the staff of Freedom Leisure Tenbury, the charities, organisations and individuals who have provided financial and technical support during our ‘Tenbury Community Pool Goes Green’ journey.”
Photo (L - R) Adrian Taylor - Chairman of Tenbury Community Pool, Ruby Collett - General Manager of Tenbury Swimming Pool, Chris Wedgbury - Freedom Leisure Area Technical Manager.