This week, Everyone Active won FIVE new council leisure contracts. Ealing. Harrow. West Northamptonshire. Cumberland. Nuneaton & Bedworth. That's 10 years of operation at each site. Nearly £4 million in confirmed upgrades at Ealing and Harrow alone. And that's just one operator, in one week.
But what happens in Year 3? Year 5? Year 8? These contracts are won on promises. Performance targets. Utilisation guarantees. Community benefit pledges. But how are they measured? How does a council actually know whether its £2.5 million Ealing investment is performing as promised?
Most councils still rely on the same metrics they've used for decades: head counts. Surveys. Manual utilisation reports. Spreadsheets filled in by staff who are already juggling hundreds of other tasks. It's not that councils don't care about data. It's that the industry has never given them any other option.
Five new 10-year contracts in a single week. That's not just growth. That's a generational bet on getting it right.
The stakes couldn't be higher. Councils are writing 10-year cheques. Operators are staking their reputation on sustainable performance. And both sides are walking into the contract with almost no real insight into whether the facility will actually deliver what was promised.
The Global Parallel
Zoom out from UK councils and you see the same pattern everywhere. PureGym: 60-65 new UK sites this year, targeting 700 clubs globally. GymNation: 20-30 new locations planned across the GCC by end of 2026. Basic-Fit now operating 2,150 clubs after acquiring Clever Fit. Planet Fitness at 2,800+ locations globally. Smart Fit passing 2,000 units across Latin America.
Everyone is building. Nobody is measuring. Not really. Not in any automated, real-time, zone-by-zone way that actually tells you what's happening inside the facilities.
The irony is striking. Global operators spend millions on market research to site new locations. They hire architects to design layouts. They negotiate lease terms to the decimal point. But then, once the facility opens, they step back and hope. Hope the design works. Hope the equipment mix resonates. Hope the space drives retention. Hope the revenue per square metre justifies the investment.
For councils, it's worse. They're operating with less cash, less market power, and more political oversight. A leisure centre that underperforms isn't just a business problem. It's a failure of civic infrastructure.
Revenue per square metre might be the most important metric the fitness industry has never consistently tracked.
The Intelligence Gap
The fitness industry has a blind spot. We know how many members sign up. We know how many walk through the door. But we have almost no idea what those members DO when they're inside.
Which zones drive retention? Which are dead space? Does that new women-only area actually get used? Is the group exercise studio delivering value, or is it empty 60% of the time? Are cardio zones attracting the right crowd, or are they intimidating newcomers? Does the stretching area work better by the window or in the corner?
This isn't guesswork. This is the difference between sustainable performance and expensive failure. A council that invests £2.5 million in an Ealing leisure centre needs to know: is Zone A (the female-only strength area) delivering value, or is it underutilised? Should we reallocate that space? Is the group fitness studio generating the engagement we projected?
An operator managing five sites can walk them and feel them. But when you're PureGym expanding to 65 new sites, or Basic-Fit managing 2,150 clubs across Europe, you can't walk them. You need data. You need a system that tells you which site is actually performing, which zones are working, and where your money is being wasted.
Revenue per square metre. It's the metric that determines whether investments pay off. And nobody is tracking it.
The Council Accountability Angle
Council leisure contracts come with KPIs. Utilisation targets. Specific community benefit obligations. But most operators report these manually; surveys, head counts, observation sheets, spreadsheets. It's labour-intensive. It's vulnerable to bias. And it's never real-time.
Imagine a different scenario. A council partner with automated spatial intelligence. Real utilisation data streaming from the facility. Zone-by-zone performance. Equipment utilisation and heatmaps. Evidence-based decisions on where to invest further, where to redesign, where to deploy additional staff.
A council leisure director could walk into a dashboard and say: "Our women-only zone is delivering 45 percent of peak utilisation and drives 23% of total facility visits. Our cardio zone is underutilised during off-peak hours. Our studio is at 78% capacity during peak times and driving 12% of total visits." Real data. Real accountability. Real grounds for renewal negotiations.
The operators who can prove their performance will win the next generation of contracts. The ones who can't, who are still relying on spreadsheets and gut feel, will be replaced.
Ten-year contracts are built on trust. But trust is verified by data.
Your Move
This week's five council contracts are a signal. The market has spoken. Councils are ready to commit. Operators are ready to build. The next decade of UK leisure infrastructure is being written right now.
But the operators who win won't be the ones with the flashiest marketing or the biggest balance sheet. They'll be the ones who can walk into a council meeting and say: "Here's exactly what happened in your facility last month. Here's where members went. Here's where they didn't. Here's what worked. Here's what we're fixing."
That's not a nice-to-have. That's a deal-maker.
If you're running five sites or 500, the question is the same: do you actually know what's happening inside them? Do you know which zones drive value? Which drive waste? Where your members go, and more importantly, where they don't?
Let's Talk
Drop me a message. Whether you're a council evaluating leisure operators, an operator bidding for contracts, or running a growing chain, let's talk about what's actually happening inside your facilities. TwinLabs provides AI-powered digital twins that deliver real-time footfall analytics, zone-level occupancy tracking, heatmaps, and multi-site benchmarking, all from existing CCTV infrastructure. No new sensors. No facial recognition. Privacy-first by design.
