Leisure centre staff across the ABC borough are facing a growing tide of abusive and “unreasonable” behaviour from customers, councillors have been told.
Alderman Margaret Tinsley has expressed her concerns over what appears to be a significant rise in the number of incidents involving customers in the ABC Borough’s leisure centre facilities.
The number of reported incidents has gone up from three in 2023/24, to six in 2024/25, and six more incidents have been reported to date in 2025/26.
The DUP representative for Craigavon DEA made her comments at Monday’s (September 8) Community & Wellbeing committee meeting of Armagh City, Banbridge & Craigavon (ABC) Borough Council.
The relevant agenda item explained: “Supporting the corporate objective to end violence against women and girls, the Indoor Leisure team have undergone training around harassment and re-training on the Council Unreasonable behaviour policy.
“Officers have also placed signage at our reception desk, stating that council has a zero tolerance to abusive behaviour.”
Referring to the rise in reported incidents, Alderman Tinsley remarked: “With regards to customer unreasonable behaviour incidents, it’s gone from three one year, to six the following year, and six this current year.
“Is there a pattern [to] these particular incidents, [and] issues that council are not addressing?
Now, there’s no excuse for it, none whatsoever, but usually for unreasonable behaviour, there’s a reason somebody’s not getting maybe an answer. “And all I’m asking is, is this something we as a council need to be looking at?”
ABC head of Health & Recreation, Darryn Causby explained the rise in reported incidents partly had to do with staff being encouraged not to tolerate such behaviour.
He commented: “As a department over the last 18 months, we have become aware of a number of issues relating to customer behaviour towards other customers, and towards our staff.
“So it’s not always the case where it’s against the council, it may involve customer on customer, customer on staff, and it was felt at a time that maybe the tolerance for some of that was a bit too high, and we needed to lower the tolerance for unreasonable behaviour from customers, and tackle it head on.
“So, in one of our closure days last year, we undertook a significant amount of staff training on the unreasonable customer behaviour policy, and then we issued some very clear guidance to managers across all of our facilities on who the appropriate officers are to deal with that at a particular point in time.
“We then had some signage up to raise a bit of awareness, to say this is not acceptable.
“Without getting into specifics, we have dealt with some very difficult issues, some very disruptive issues, and I am actually pleased that the numbers have gone up, because our staff are reporting to us as management that we’re now starting to take action in areas that they felt that we should. So that has been a positive for the department.
“It’s a negative in the sense that we are having to deal with unreasonable behaviour.
“Where issues arise as a matter of service delivery or anything like that, we’ll take that through the normal complaints process, and deal with it that way. We wouldn’t necessarily tag that as unreasonable customer behaviour.
“This [happens] where we’ve had an incident [involving] a customer, and we’ve actually gone through and applied the policy, and there’s been an investigation and an outcome, and that outcome is then communicated to the customers themselves.
“Some of that has resulted in suspensions and bans, and withdrawal of services, and things like that, as well as consequences for that. And that’s ongoing on a regular basis.”
