A year of lobbying, refinancing, landlord negotiations, and staff crises tested the sector to the limit in 2021, but the underlying trend was resolutely upwards, driven by an irrepressible energy

Welcome to the second of our pandemic special review editions of HCM, following on from the first edition in 2020.

We’ve reflected back on the past year to curate the stories that defined the sector during the second year of the pandemic.

Although everyone will have a different story to tell, overall, 2021 was essentially a major stress test for the sector and saw operators grappling with a barrage of challenges, from landlord disputes to software reconfigurations. It was the kind of year where every decision is mission-critical, requiring deep reserves of resilience, but the good news is that the sector made it though – battered and bruised, but still largely intact.

The biggest challenges inevitably revolved around money, with issues relating to balance sheets, cashflow and rent payments dominating the headlines. The downside? Several major players went through CVAs and restructures, but the upside was the healthy interest shown by the investor community and local authorities in backing the sector, enabling the vast majority of operators to survive and start to bounce back.

Investor engagement was one of the major defining characteristics of 2021 – you could say it was the year investors really got fitness – and governments started to.

Issues around employment status were huge for industry workers in 2021 – especially the self-employed. Current staff shortages being experienced across the sector are a direct consequence of the patchy job that was done in protecting the livelihoods of the freelancers we rely on – too many of whom were let down and unable to claim government support due to a lack of a paper trail and who have exited the sector as a result.

This is something to be fixed going forward, so the people who enable the industry to function have more job security.

In spite of the upheaval, there are some huge positives to be taken from this challenging year in terms of the way consumers had our back. They voted in our parliamentary petition to get gyms open, they were queuing outside at midnight when gyms reopened and market research showed them expressing a new and more powerful appreciation of their health clubs and leisure centres and a greater desire to stay fit and healthy.

Going forward, we must harness this energy far more and engage our customers in our work to get both essential service status and greater government recognition for what we do as a sector. It matters to them and we need to respect this fact far more than before.

Ultimately, the deeper bond with consumers that has started to emerge during the pandemic will be the bedrock on which the future of the industry is built.