Cornwall's council-owned leisure centres are facing a financial crisis after an incident at Lux Park in Liskeard last year highlighted a multi-million pound backlog of essential maintenance work.

A report to this week's meeting of the council's Cabinet stated that a survey carried out after the incident had clearly identified a lack of investment in the maintenance of the council's leisure services estate which had resulted in increased health and safety risks.

Members of the Cabinet on Wednesday backed a call for £3,912,092 of capital resources to be used to pay for the repairs and other urgent and essential health and safety works across the county. They were told the alternative was to selectively close leisure centres to eliminate risks and were warned: 'Failure to address these risks could result in action by the Health and Safety Executive (HSE), including criminal proceedings.'

Councillors heard that on top of the £3m-plus emergency work, £9,048,424 of works were urgently needed to avoid the loss of service in the event of sudden failure of plant and equipment across the network of leisure centres and that, when other outstanding work was taken into consideration, the total estimated cost would be £18,231,705.

In addition to approving the initial £3m-plus expenditure, the Cabinet also supported a strategic review by Tempus Leisure, which runs the centres on behalf of the council, of the future provision of leisure services in the county.

The problems came to light in September last year when a section of ventilation ducting at Lux Park became detached from the main body of the duct and fell about 10 feet into the launch area of the flume at the side of the main 25m pool. This resulted in the closure of the pool at the centre over a number of days.

'Fortunately, there were no injuries; however, the incident was reported to Public Health and Protection and is currently being jointly investigated by PH&P and the HSE, the Cabinet was told.

'The HSE has raised a number of questions to enable them to target their investigations appropriately, which includes a request to provide information on the budgetary arrangements for routine and emergency maintenance prior to the incident and any changes made following the incident.'

Short-term corrective action was taken including remedial works at both the Lux Park and Saltash centres.

Customers were ushered out of both buildings on the evening of Friday, November 8, last year.

Lux Park remained closed for two weeks causing controversy among customers as they were given no prior warning of the closure and they said the explanations were not good enough.