Contractor announced for new Huddersfield Sports Centre

BAM Construction’s North East team has been successful in meeting stage one of a two stage procurement process, utilising the Regional ‘YORbuild’ Procurement Framework for construction projects. The council will continue to work with BAM to meet stage 2 requirements, which will take the build of the sports centre one step further, with a contract between BAM and the Council intended to be signed later this year.

Construction of the new centre is expected to start in 2013. The new centre is planned to be open to the public in 2015.

BAM offer a customer-centric, creative and sustainable approach to their building work which was a consideration of the council’s evaluation process. The contract sets out the expectations of the council in providing a unique state of the art leisure centre, which is environmentally friendly and offers employment opportunities to apprentices.

Confirming that the preferred bidder has been selected, Cllr Jean Calvert, Kirklees Council Cabinet Member for Communities, said: ‘This is great news for Kirklees and is a major step forward for the regeneration of the town and a welcome boost for the local economy. Whilst the process has been thorough and taken quite a while to get to this stage, I’m delighted that we now have BAM has the preferred contractor. This means we are one step further to building a new leisure centre which will complement our other successful centres across the district, which are managed by Kirklees Active Leisure, including the newly extended/enhanced Holmfirth site, Dewsbury and Batley centres. Not only have we been working closely with communities to improve quality of life, but building the sport centre will help with our regeneration plans for the town, as well as supporting apprenticeships and creating job opportunities. It will also show how, with the right facilities and support in place, children and adults of all ages and abilities from a diverse range of backgrounds can stay healthy and fit and socialise in a safe environment. The centre will also give us the ability to support potential future sports champions.’

For BAM project and construction director John Phillips said: ‘We very much value the opportunity to work with Kirklees Council and are pleased to be building again in Huddersfield where we most recently delivered the Business School for the University, for which we’ve also delivered several other projects. As a community-minded contractor, this is a great building to be delivering because it means so much to the people around it. We’re sure that it will be an impressive building and it sits well with our other leisure sector projects in Yorkshire such as the City Varieties and the Leeds Arena, and we’re looking forward to making an early start.’

The building of the new centre follows a consultation process from planning to design which resulted in thousands of public responses.

The features will include a 25-metre swimming pool; a teaching pool; two sports halls; climbing, squash and martial arts facilities; a large fitness suite; and a café and children’s area. The new centre will also include a family leisure water facility, including a beach, flume, sidewinder and several more water features.

The sports centre will be owned by the council but managed by Kirklees Active Leisure. It will replace the Southgate sports centre which is coming to the end of its life and will close once the new centre is up and running.