A survey of sporta members has shown significant support for the Government's £140m free swim initiative.

The results come in the wake of a report into the Government scheme, which found that more than 4.4 million free swims were taken in the first three months alone, stirring a renewed push by the DCMS to encourage local authorities to sign up to the initiative.

sporta, the representative body for leisure and cultural trusts in the UK, asked its members whether they had signed up to the scheme and if they had seen major increases in attendance. 76 per cent of the trusts that responded said they were offering free swimming to people over 60 years old and 60 per cent of the trusts were providing it for under 16 year olds across all their leisure centres.

Huge rises in attendance were reported by many of the trusts. Impulse Leisure in Essex has doubled its number of swims. More than 1,100 over 60s signed up to the scheme and enjoyed more than 2,000 attendances each month. The trust expects the figures to continue increasing.

South Suffolk Leisure reported the biggest increase. In the first five months of the initiative, Hadleigh Swimming Pool saw 100 per cent participation against its annual target and Kingfisher Leisure Centre saw 82 per cent of its annual participation. Tracey Copping, Chief Executive of South Suffolk Leisure said: "Both centres are experiencing levels of participation that have not been seen for more than 20 years! An impressive 34 per cent of Babergh's eligible residences have now registered to the programme, which equates to 13,177 registrations."

Wigan Leisure and Culture Trust is offering free swimming to all ages during the next two years and saw an overall increase of 40 per cent in the first quarter of 2009/10. The star performer in the first quarter was Hindley Pool, set in an area of deprivation, which achieved a 48 per cent increase in swimming.

sporta trusts also reported on how they were using their allocated share of the Government's £25m Capital Modernisation Fund, put in place to support the free swimming initiative. All but one said the money would be used, among other small projects, to refurbish their changing facilities. Craig McAteer, Chair of sporta said: "Research shows that up to 23 per cent of customers stop using leisure centres because of the quality of their changing rooms, so we were encouraged to see that sporta members are using the Government assistance to help fund better quality changing rooms. We hope that this investment will continue to attract new users to our sites and encourage existing members to continue enjoying activities at their trust managed leisure centre."

However, Tees Active's Managing Director Steven Chaytor believes the scheme, whilst well intentioned, does have its pitfalls. "We have seen such an influx of free swims that we are losing fee paying customers because we can no longer offer the same quality of experience," said Chaytor. "Numerically the scheme would appear to be successful, but increased lifeguard, cleaning, administration, reception and chemical costs added to lost income from paying customers means that free swimming is costing us considerably."

Some trusts that did not take part in the scheme explained that they could not 'make the finances stack up', but had put in place alternative local measures to encourage participation.

Neil Cameron, Centre Manager from Wave Leisure in East Sussex said: "Some excellent partnership working with Lewes District Council has enabled us to launch a trial scheme at two of our pools that offers two hours free swimming a week for over 60s and four hours free swimming for under 16s during school holidays until the end of March next year. The sessions are proving very popular and this example of a locally agreed and funded scheme looks like being very successful."