Campaigners have threatened to conduct a search of the council offices if details of the sale of a cherished swimming pool are not released.

Arthur Hill Campaign’s Peter Burt wrote to Peter Sloman, chief executive at Reading Borough Council (RBC), stating his demands and threatening a series of actions until the information is presented.

The protest ‘programme’ includes plans to wash the council’s windows, conduct a training session and leaflet council employees.

Peter Burt said: “We consider these to be matters of widespread local interest which members of the public have every right to know.

“Our complaints have been unanswered, our petitions have been ignored, and our requests for information have been turned down.

“We consider that there has been ample time for the Council to conclude details of the sale and exchange contracts with the buyer.

“Despite this the Council continues to stay silent about the sale of the pool.

“The Arthur Hill Campaign is no longer prepared to tolerate this state of affairs and will be taking matters into our own hands in order to obtain details of the sale.”

If the council do not release details of the sale before New Year’s Eve, campaigners will visit the council offices on Friday, January 4 and wash its windows ‘to symbolically make Reading Borough Council a more transparent organisation’.

They will follow this by leafletting council employees, on January 11, to urge them to whistle-blow, before conducting ‘a non-violent’ training session a week later, on January 18.

Their ‘final action’ will be to enter the council offices to undertake a document search for the information about the pool sale.

The campaigners will call a halt to the ‘programme’ if the council agree to provide details of the sale of the popular pool, which closed in August 2016.

RBC’s policy committee agreed to sell the site at July’s policy committee but has not revealed the identity of the buyer, the amount paid and what the site will become.

At the policy committee on November 26, councillor Jo Lovelock, leader of the council, confirmed that RBC received three bids to retain the existing swimming pool on site.

All three bids were considered but none of the were taken forward, with one withdrawn by the bidder, and the others not chosen 'given the need to secure the best possible capital receipt' for the provision of a new swimming pool at Palmer Park.

She also confirmed at the meeting that the council are progressing towards an exchange of contracts and said it was not unusual for ‘transaction of this sort to take some time for the contract to be finalised’.