Let down: why students should fight S10 for every last penny

The gym has broken its contracts with 2010-11 members

A year after Goodwin first closed its pool – a closure that saw members, including the swimming club sorely disappointed – the anger rumbles on.

It’s hardly any wonder. The handling of the whole affair has been a top notch example of how to insult your customers, while providing students and public alike with a lesson in how to run a business without any sense of fairness or consideration. At this point, it’s less of a frustration, and more of an out-and-out piss take, with revelations that S10 have, in fact, operated in breach of their contracts.

The whole fandango that took place last academic year presented S10 Health with plenty of opportunities to not provide such a textbook case of shoddy customer service. Instead, gym members were poorly communicated with and fobbed off with a pitiful amount of money returned.

As if the lack of communication last year wasn’t enough, S10 added insult to injury this September by deciding a cut-off date for reclaiming money, but failing to tell members. Conveniently, this date was set for September 1 – before most students could return to Sheffield to be reimbursed.

In any other situation, this kind of service would not be tolerable. If your local supermarket didn’t have fresh produce for six months, you would not expect to pay for the meat, fish and vegetables you weren’t getting as part of your weekly shop. It would be charging for a product that isn’t available. So how can S10 justify charging for a service which isn’t available?

A few months after the reopening, I couldn’t help but notice the irony when S10 asked members to complete a survey about the swimming pool facility. The only answer anyone could have given, realistically, is “Well, it would have been nice if it was open”.  Too much to ask, clearly.

The beginning of a new academic year could have, again, been a chance for S10 Health to take a look at the whole shebang and act on it. Instead, once again, members and users have been let down, with sports teams forced to completely rethink their training programmes due to a lack of available facilities, despite being assured previously that work would be completed by now.

The sub-standard management ability that S10 has shown does not bode well for all those students and members of the public who’ve bought into the gym’s assertions that renovations taking place in December and April will not last months longer than originally claimed. The clause in the new gym contract, which states that refunds will not be given even if renovations exceed 30 days, is surely a sign of things to come.

So, with all this in mind, every last person who has been let down should do their absolute best to challenge S10. No longer is it just a matter of awful customer service – when breaches of contract like this happen, it’s up to all of us to hold S10 accountable to the law.

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