Enjoy Leisure Café Consultation Period

Following a drop in customer usage and rising costs, Enjoy Leisure, East Lothian’s health and wellbeing charity, is set to close the on-site cafés at their Sport and Leisure Centres across East Lothian.

Post pandemic, visitor numbers to our cafés have not recovered to previous levels. This combined with rising overheads, utility, and consumable costs, the cafés are no longer financially viable, and the level of subsidy previously provided, is unsustainable.

Bill Axon, Chief Executive of Enjoy Leisure said, “Like many other organisations right now, we are facing unprecedented rising costs in an environment where public finances remain under considerable pressure.

“In 2025/2026 and beyond we are facing an incredibly challenging cost driven environment, which means having to make some difficult choices regarding affordability and where we can invest or do things differently, nonetheless, we have achieved a great deal in making the charity more cost efficient and effective. However, as a charity and having received no financial support or otherwise from either Westminster or Scottish Governments, during or post enforced covid lockdowns, where no income was realised (estimated loss of income of £3.7 million), we have been unable to fully recover successfully from these shortfalls.

“The decision to close all our Enjoy Leisure cafés was extremely difficult – we held off reaching this conclusion for as long as possible, whilst we worked towards increasing footfall, which in an extremely competitive marketplace has proved beyond our reach.

“I know our café colleagues are very highly regarded by our customers, members, by me and everyone within the Enjoy Leisure team. For this reason, we are working with each of them in an effort to find an alternative role within the organisation. We will be consulting with relevant staff over a minimum 90-day period, and we will continue to welcome the East Lothian community and visitors to our cafés during this time.”