The city council cannot escape blame for the trouble it has got into on spending. It is facing a £5.2m hole in its budget next year.

The statistics say it is an expensive authority to run.

By that, we do not mean that it chooses to spend more money providing more services than other authorities (although to some extent it undoubtedly does). We mean that in many cases it spends more money providing the same services as other district authorities.

Leisure is a particular example where it costs more to provide the same service as it does in similar authorities.

This is so much the case that a special team has been set up to rein in spending at the leisure and cultural services department. The council is predicting a £975,000 overspend on its services this year and a third of it is due to leisure services.

Meanwhile, among the proposals to tackle the multi-million pound deficits facing it in future years, the city council is proposing to save £20,000 by reducing the temperature at swimming pools and £40,000 by pulling out of Britain in Bloom and cutting the floral displays that do so much to brighten the city in the summer.

We ask our readers to cast their minds back 18 months when this same city council decided to offer free swimming to everyone aged under 17 in the city at an annual cost of £125,000. A few weeks later it had to concede that not only was this free swimming to be offered to every under 17-year-old in the city, but European rules meant it had to be offered to every child in the land.

At the time, we criticised the free-swimming plan as an election gimmick - one that clearly did not work. It was proposed in the run-up to city council elections that eventually saw the Labour group lose its control of the council.

Today, the decision on free swimming can only be described as reckless.

In an ideal world, we would all love to have free swimming. In the real world, nothing comes without a cost.