An update from our CEO

23 December 2020

The Scottish Government announced at the weekend that from 26 December all mainland Scotland will be under Level 4 restrictions for a period of three weeks. Regrettably, the announcement means that we require to close all Live Borders public facing facilities and services until January 18th at the earliest.

The implications for all Live Borders staff and customers is significant and clearly, although there is never a good time, the closures being announced just before the festive break is particularly difficult for everybody. This whole year has been a difficult and challenging one for us all and we recognise that we will likely be realising the impact of the pandemic for some time to come.

I wanted to take this opportunity to pay tribute to the hard work, resilience and dedication of all my Live Borders colleagues, who over the last months have made sacrifice and quickly developed new ways of working to allow customers to return safely to our facilities and services. I am immensely proud of, and grateful to them all.

I also want to take time to thank our members and customers for their ongoing support and understanding through this challenging period. Your support and patience is hugely appreciated by all of us at Live Borders. We recognise the importance of our services to our communities, particularly during these difficult times, and understand that it can be frustrating for many that we are not able to provide the full breadth of services you associate with us.

We have always recognised the fact that additional restrictions could stall our recovery from the pandemic and steps have been taken to ensure that we can restart effectively when the restrictions permit. During the imposed lockdown we will be providing some digital and virtual activities to keep you physically and mentally active, information on these services can be gathered from our website.

Elsewhere in the country other Leisure and Cultural service providers have managed their response to the pandemic differently. Some have kept all of their services closed others have opened more, more quickly. We have sought to restart services gradually and carefully always with the safety of public and staff as our priority. We apply a five test criteria to every service we plan to open to ensure safety of people and to protect the going concern status, and long term sustainability of Live Borders.

On week commencing the 11th January, we expect the First Minister to review restriction levels and clearly we hope that the Scottish Borders is placed in a lower level. As soon as we know what level we will be placed in, we will quickly review our operations and share our decisions on restarting with you.

I thank you again for all your support and wish you a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.

Ewan Jackson
CEO
Live Borders