When it comes to health delivery, Mytime Active is knocking on new doors and tearing up the funding rulebook. Its new CEO speaks to Kate Cracknell

What’s your history with Mytime Active?
I started my career at Mytime Active 27 years ago – as a lifeguard and then GM – before moving to Freedom Leisure and then Woking Borough Council. But I was born and bred in Bromley. I learned to swim at Walnuts Leisure Centre in Orpington and spent a lot of my youth there. So Mytime Active has been an important part of my development, not only professionally but also personally.

By 2024, I had done over four years at Woking Borough Council and had learned so much about the public sector. However, I was missing that direct link into leisure and the community. I saw a return to Mytime as a great opportunity to get back to what I truly loved doing. I joined as operations director last May, becoming CEO in April of this year.

Where does Mytime Active operate?
Mytime Active is a social enterprise that operates 19 sites across the UK, primarily in Bromley, but also through contracts with Birmingham City Council and New Forest District Council.

We run a diverse range of services across the UK – including 11 golf courses, some with leisure provision – with a vision of improving wellbeing across our communities.

How important is fitness in your portfolio?
In total, we have six sites with gyms, but fitness is very important to our overall offering. Within the Bromley area, it remains the focus of what we do.

We especially target the communities who find traditional fitness less accessible. For example, we have a programme called Primetime for members aged over 60. It started with 79 members back in 2007. We now have over 3,500 Primetime members.

What makes Primetime so different is that it isn’t just a membership product for people over a certain age. That isn’t how we run it. It’s for over 60s, but we try to make it different. There’s Pilates, Zumba Gold, golf, line dancing, table tennis, tenpin bowling … but the real key is the social element, with coffee meet-ups, lunches and soirees where we get singers in and 150+ Primetime members in attendance.

We introduce all new Primetime members to a buddy – volunteers who’ve had dementia-friendly training and who are there to offer peer-to-peer support. They’ll attend activities with the new members and stay afterwards for teas, coffees and biscuits. They’re absolutely integral to our business and making people feel part of a community, not just a member of a local gym.

Some of our younger team will often be around, too, and they’ll get involved, having cups of tea with the Primetime members. It creates a wonderful inter-generational approach across our facilities. We know the huge toll of loneliness on society and individuals. This is one of the ways we can help tackle it.

What other outreach work do you do?
We do a huge amount of work in health. I know the sector as a whole is working towards this, but I’d say Mytime was an early adopter. For years now, we’ve engaged in a number of tendered health programmes, from managing a Wellbeing Hub on behalf of public health to our Active Lifestyles programme. We also run Vital Five, offering health checks for things such as blood pressure.

All three programmes are paid for either by public health agencies or by integrated care boards. We work with our big local hospitals, too, delivering cardiac rehab programmes or pulmonary rehabilitation.

What’s next on your health agenda?
Where possible, I’d like us to be less reliant on tendered services. We spend a lot of time preparing, tendering and trying to gain financial support for a programme, creating something that’s really good but that only runs for a short time before funding runs out.

I feel we need to be a true partner to health and this requires building things with longevity and a long-term impact. Instead of Public Health England saying ‘we want someone to deliver this’, let’s identify the problems at source and work collaboratively with our public health teams and our health partners to come up with solutions.

Of course, the problem in leisure is that we often don’t have the right access to the right people, which makes it hard to get anything off the ground. My experience at Woking has been invaluable in this respect. Our CEO was really innovative in his focus on health and he opened a lot of doors for me to run health programmes the likes of which I’d never have been able to run previously, as a leisure operator. Back then, I couldn’t even get a seat at the table to have the conversation.

During my time at Woking Borough Council, I learned how to get to places I couldn’t previously reach as a charity or a corporation. For example, I did some work with the North West Surrey Alliance, delivering physiotherapy in leisure centres: Ashford and St Peter’s Hospitals moved a large proportion of its physiotherapy team out of the hospital environment and into Woking Leisure Centre – and the outcomes, both for the NHS and for leisure, were very positive.

People were getting better quicker. We taught them their rehab exercises in a gym setting and gave them free gym access for the duration of their physio appointments, followed by a discounted health membership at the end to keep their rehabilitation going. This also meant a huge increase in the number of people coming to the leisure centre, many of whom then stayed as members. It was a real win-win.

We rolled out lots of other sessions, too, including cardiac rehabilitation and surgical prehabilitation.

These are the sorts of programme I would love to see Mytime Active deliver in partnership with our local integrated care boards.

What progress have you made so far?
It’s early days, but we’re starting to have conversations around how we can work together. We’re increasingly being recognised as part of a whole system approach, delivering health and wellbeing for our local communities, which is so important.

We’re also making good progress with our council partners. Before I went to Woking, I didn’t really appreciate that councils had specific teams working on reducing antisocial behaviour in the borough, for example. I do now, so I can approach the council and ask to speak to the head of community safety. I can ask about their problems and how we can help.

As a result, we’re looking at replicating in Bromley something we did in Surrey: The Friday Night Project. I don’t want to do it independently of our partners; one of the things that made The Friday Night Project so successful in Woking and wider Surrey was the collaboration with partners. But crucially, I now know who those partners are and can work with the council to engage them – be that the head of police or local fire service. Having them come to the sessions really broadens the impact.

I also chair Pro-Active Bromley, where a lot of third sector organisations get together alongside public health. We’ve begun to discuss opportunities for collaboration. For example, public health might share data around areas of concern – issues of antisocial behaviour in certain parts of the borough or disproportionate numbers of children with obesity, for example – and collectively, we’ll discuss what we can do to help.

Public health might not have the money available to commission a new scheme, but between us we might already be running something that’s doing 70 per cent of what’s really needed. We just might not be getting to the people public health needs us to. So, it’s over to public health agencies to open the doors and get us talking to the right people, so we can have the desired impact.

How will you fund your health work?
There are a few programmes we currently receive funding for, including our Active Lifestyles referrals scheme and Aqua Active, which allows Bromley families that have children with complex needs to come and use our pools.

However, we all know the NHS is under huge pressure and that public health budgets are being cut left, right and centre. We have to look at how we can work collaboratively, taking pressure off the health service without needing it to fund us.

If you look at the Woking physiotherapy initiative, for example, there was no cost to the leisure provider. It simply opened up space for the hospital team to deliver in the leisure centre. At most, there was an opportunity cost, giving up some space to the NHS – but that space hadn’t been used effectively for a long time and the benefit to the community was enormous.

Mytime Active’s MyClub is another great example. A programme for adults with special educational needs, it started off as a funded scheme. However, we very quickly realised we could deliver a lot of it without funding.

The fact that it initially came through a funding channel gave us a really good foundation – showing us who we should to talk to, who to outreach with, who the carers were, who the different charities, groups and social services were that we needed to work with. It opened a lot of doors – and once those doors were open, we found that it was easy to carry on.

We now run a really successful club every week where the participants use a range of our leisure facilities, from group exercise classes to golf to tenpin bowling.

The cost to us is low when considering the outcomes that the programme achieves, meaning that we can deliver it over the long term without the need for external funding. And in the end, this is part of our vision.

It’s part of who we are as a social enterprise and an absolute no-brainer in terms of it being the right thing for us to do.

Tell us about your wellbeing hubs.
The physical wellbeing hub opened in June 2024, in a shopping centre in Bromley. On-site are lots of different healthcare professionals, as well as services such as a Citizens Advice Bureau. We run Vital Five from this hub, as well as programmes such as smoking cessation, healthy weight classes, drug and alcohol rehab and mental health support.

We also have virtual wellbeing hubs for Bromley and also for Birmingham. When people make contact with us, we triage them to identify the best access route into our facilities and services. For some that will be a traditional route into fitness, starting with a gym induction with health and nutrition advice; in Birmingham, it might be golf or wellbeing walks. However, if people have health concerns, we have a whole raft of programmes to support them, from healthy weight management to cardiac rehab, Escape Pain to Primetime and more.

Do you have ambitions to grow?
We’re not trying to grow significantly and don’t have plans to start tendering against other operators for new contracts, however, we’re exploring ways to offer more within our existing geographies to even better support our existing local authority partners.

In Bromley, for example, we’re already looking at how we can help schools develop their health and wellbeing programmes. We see a big opportunity there and we’d love to partner with them to do that.

We’re passionate about Bromley, Birmingham and the New Forest and believe we can have a big impact in these areas, helping people live longer, happier, healthier lives. We’re working hard to make what we already have work really well.

Fortunately, we won’t be significantly impacted by upcoming local government reorganisation. Bromley is already a unitary authority – as all London boroughs are. Birmingham City Council, as a city council, won’t go through any reorganisation. So it’s only New Forest District Council that will be impacted. We’ll work with the teams there to ensure that whatever happens, we’re a strong partner.

What changes do you hope for in the sector?
For me, the headline word is collaboration. For a long time, this was a really competitive market. No-one was working together. Now, it really feels as though we’re starting to collaborate.

Mytime Active already speaks with the likes of Places Leisure, Everyone Active and a number of other trusts: Trafford Leisure, for example, recently asked for advice on launching a volunteer scheme which we were delighted to support. We’d be really happy to work alongside private operators too.

We don’t see this as a competitive market and we’re happy to share: the more of us there are helping people become healthier, happier and living longer, the better. If we can help, we absolutely will.