Hi Lottie,

Your YMC appears to concern two separate issues- the safety of the public using the Jubilee alongside students and also the fairness of them using it when slots are limited. I'll attempt to answer each in turn. 

Safety

Where the university has moved to offering students two lateral flow tests a week, this is an identical testing regime to what members of the public are now offered by the government so there is no difference for safety between students and non-students using the facilities. Interestingly, where older people have been offered the vaccine before our age group, there is a school of though to say they may actually be safer, so there are no safety grounds for us to ask for them to be excluded from the facilities. 

Fairness

While on the face of it it may seem unfair in the short term that public are able to access the facilities while there is insufficient capacity for students, we need to take a longer term view. The truth is that there has always been insufficient capacity in the gym and Covid has only exacerbated an existing problem. I have been working with the university for some time to have input on a project to expand the jubilee to address the problem at it's root cause. However, any form of improvement of this nature needs buy-in from stakeholders including the local community in order to be successful. Excluding the local community would risk alienating them when the university needs to rely on their support at a later date to deliver improvements for students. While it is frustrating in the short term, the long term benefits for students will significantly outweigh this. 

I have also asked sport and wellbeing for some statistics which show that on average no more than 10% of slots are occupied by members of the local community, meaning the vast majority of spaces are being used by students.