Moray Fit-Life? card prices ‘unfair’ and outpacing poorer families, warns councillor
The pricing of Moray-wide fitness card has been branded “inequitable and unfair” towards some of the region’s poorest families.
Moray councillor Sonya Warren (Buckie, SNP) has voiced her ongoing concern that the local authority-run Fit-Life? card scheme is stacked against single adults and single parent families.
The card not only allows holders to access any Moray Council run leisure facility as well as Moray Leisure Centre, it also permits them to use similar facilities in Highland, Aberdeen, Argyll and Bute, Orkney, Shetland, Western Isles and Borders at no extra cost.
She said: “For quite a while now I’ve been concerned about the council charges for Fit-Life? cards and have been pushing to make it more equitable.
“Before price rises set by the recent council budget come into effect, a single adult card cost £288 with a single adult family one costing £384.
“However, if you buy a card for two adults plus kids that’s costing you £408. If you assume that the two adults split the cost, that makes it £84 cheaper than if you buy a single adult one. If you look at it from the family side, you’re basically getting a second adult adult added for just £24 compared to the one adult version, plus the kids going free.
“This is just crazy - why should you effectively get a second adult added on for just £24 more?
“This is inequitable and unfair. Single adult families often tend to be lower paid and/or vulnerable. There’s usually just the one income coming into the household rather than the two you might have in a two adult household.”
Councillor Warren went on to say that a huge opportunity to go some way to right this imbalance had been missed when the local authority considered its budget for 2025-26 recently.
She continued: “The recent budget has actually compounded the problem rather than making it better.
“The Fit-Life? charges have been raised whereas the SNP’s alternative budget asked that they be kept the same, at least for the single family cards.
“The budget was an opportunity to at least try and make things fairer, but it’s been missed.
“It’s an issue that keeps on getting kicked down the road. Every time I’ve raised it previously I kept getting told that it will be dealt with as part of the leisure estate review. That’s been the case for a couple of years now.
“The leisure review was published in January but there’s still no word of a timeline to deal with this issue.
“At the end of the day it’s so unfair on some of those in our communities who can afford it least and that simply is not right. It makes accessing fitness and leisure facilities so much more expensive for absolutely no reason.
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“Equality and inclusion strategies are supposed to be priorities for the council; it’s something they’re suppose to be tackling, not compounding.”
Kicked down the road
