Heswall Rackets Club
Gayton Playing Fields, 12A Brimstage Road • Heswall, Wirral • CH60 1XG
Tel: 0151 342 2817
Treasurer’s Report 2025 The year 2025 will go down in club history as the year that we took a bold step towards what should hopefully become a brighter future for us again. Having endured a long and costly journey to secure planning permission for our new padel courts, we were finally able to move through with the construction phase, and achieve a softlaunch just before Christmas. This was a true HRC team effort. We extend our special thanks to Ged and Roger for their vision, and financial planning, and to the Padel sub-Committee for their hands-on management. Our thanks also go to our medium-term lenders, and to everyone who helped us cross the finish line.
Ahead of our ‘new beginning’, the club continued its recovery from the triple shock of the pandemic, the energy crisis, and high inflation – challenges that have hit the leisure and hospitality industry particularly hard this decade. Membership receipts provided a key indicator of recovery, rising 19.9% against 2024. A number of new members joined later in the year anticipating the padel launch, while others were drawn in earlier by our indoor sports, driving squash and racketball income up 12.4% on 2024. All club sections foster a vibrant, inclusive culture, with racketball and the juniors especially setting an excellent example for other clubs in the area. Finally, our bar and functions showed great resilience against a tough economic backdrop, introducing new faces to the club and successfully driving membership growth.
Overall, the club recorded a £7.1k loss, though £2.3k of this stems from the December soft-launch of padel, where we incurred initial equipment and depreciation costs against minimal early income. While a loss is lessthan-ideal, this represents steady improvement on the prior year. In fact, because our non-cash depreciation charge was £10.7k, the club generated a positive cash surplus on ordinary activities of £3.5k – up from just £0.3k in 2024. This surplus means that we can comfortably pay our day-to-day bills as they fall due. However, it is important to note that our current cash flow still limits our ability to reinvest in upgrades to the general facilities at the levels we were accustomed to pre-pandemic.
In recognition of our improving outlook, the Committee has begun cautiously reinvesting in our facilities. On the revenue-generating side, in addition to padel we introduced a new club website that has driven higher engagement and directly converted interest into new sales. We have also completed essential maintenance works, notably upgrading our CCTV system, and improving the ventilation in the men’s changing room.
As we cross the mid-year mark in 2026, the club’s financial picture is remarkably different. Padel has enjoyed a strong start, showing encouraging resilience through the winter months and flourishing with the recent excellent weather. All other performance indicators are equally positive, with activity and revenue across squash/racketball, the bar, and functions all running ahead of the same point in 2025.
Jeremy Heywood
Treasurer
August 2026
15/08/2026
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