Dear Members,

The Central YMCA has not shut down – we have announced the sale of our Club site at 112 Great Russell Street only. Our operations, including our education services and programmes across the country, will still continue and we still have CYMCA club sites at Kings Cross and Moorgate.

We are currently in negotiation with local providers to ensure continuance of older adult provision.
We will also be running classes out of our Moorgate and KX facilities. Details of these class schedules will be released pre-Christmas. We will not be in a position to release a full view of retained services until the staff consultation process has completed at the end of January.

Yes, absolutely. Details of these class schedules will be released pre-Christmas.

We are still reviewing full continuance or transference of provision and will release full details this side of Christmas, but the hope it to be able to continue Positive Health out of our KX site.

Repairing the pool was considered imperative to continue superior provision, unfortunately the loss of ~900 members during its period of closure that did not return on re-opening compounded the financial challenges faced by the building’s operation.

We are going through a consultancy process currently and cannot pre-determine the outcomes of this but we will retain as many staff as we are able.

Regrettably this is not a feasible scenario. The sale has been completed, and the rising costs, declining utilisation and projected maintenance costs make continued operations untenable.

Whilst the collective consultation is ongoing we cannot speculate or pre-judge on final conclusions. However, our ambition is to ensure as much of our existing service provision continues. Once this part of the process has been concluded we will share further details as appropriate.

We intend to share more information on the services that will be retained before Christmas.

We wanted to keep the site open as long as possible and ensure the facility was open over the Christmas period. Announcing any earlier would have put this in jeopardy.

We will be sharing high-level proposals before Christmas, and these will be further developed in early January. We will look to set up stakeholder sessions, including discussions with members, before final plans are formalised.

The decision to replace the pool filters was made in January, the financial challenges were known at this point and repair was considered conditional to ongoing future viability. Unfortunately, the situation declined further resulting in us making a speculative approach to market in late May as to sale value. A process that we reasonably expected to take up to a year. We received an offer meeting conditional on an expedited sale within weeks that met all requirements.

Operational matters for all registered charities are the legal and regulatory responsibility of the trustees and senior leadership. We explored all options exhaustively before accepting the sad reality that the sale was our only option.

To allow for a fair and comprehensive consultancy process with the affected employees.