Cheaper gym and au membership
Category: Idea
Voting closed
Having been at this university for four years i have met some fantastic student athletes who all love to represent the University of Liverpool across the country and perform to the highest standard possible whilst wearing the Liverpool colours. However students i have spoken to all share the same grievances about the cost of joining the gym at the start of the year. A student pays £208 yearly for gym membership with an extra £35 added on top of that for AU membership. While i realise the maintainenece of a gym and a sports ground is not cheap I do feel that after having paid £9000 a year to get my undergraduate degree some money from that can definetly be funneled into funding university sports and making gym membership just that little bit cheaper. £208 may not seem like a huge sum of money however when we compare this yearly cost to Newcastle's £110, Durham's £120 UCL's £160 and Manchester's £165. We can see that other big university's offer gym prices much cheaper. I've heard the university no loner finds sports development, perhaps they shoud reconsider that decision and stop forcing students to bear the brunt of the cost. University is all about trying new things and one of the best ways to get involved is thorugh sport it would be a shame to exclude someone just because they can't afford it.
Comments
Thanks for this Beth, I'll get back to asap :)
This will be discussed at the Guild summit. We will hopefully have some info from Sport Liverpool about how they set their membership prices to go with this.
This idea was discussed at Guild Summit on 26th November where they decided they were in support of the idea but acknowledged that it was not necessarily cheaper prices needed, but that the Guild should lobby for more flexible membership options, as students are currently required to join for a full year. Suggestions included monthly payment options, activity Specific membership e.g. swimming or squash only and trail periods / tasters. It was also noted that the gym is in need of expansion or refurbishment as it seems near capacity at current membership levels. However, as the meeting did not have enough attendees to declare it a valid meeting, the outcome will be referred to the student officers to decide whether to upload the decision or refer to the next Guild Summit.
Over the past year, the Student Officer team have worked with Sport Liverpool on several key areas of improvement to their services. Along with improvements to their facilities, Gym and AU fees have been a crucial element of the Officers’ work with Sport Liverpool. As part of this, requests for clarification between levels of membership and what services these include were made, as well as the introduction of a fully-flexible monthly direct debit for Premium membership. After a successful trial of this payment method, Sport Liverpool also agreed to implement a similar option for Standard membership. The Officers’ also lobbied for the introduction of an AU + gym membership, allowing AU members to just pay one set price.