The Village Halls Podcast
A podcast for anyone involved in the running of Britain's 10,000 village, church and community and anyone interested in the vital community services they provide.
The Village Halls Podcast
Legionnaire's Disease: The Silent Threat in Village Halls
The hidden dangers lurking in your village hall's water system could be putting your community at risk. Water safety expert Dee Thornton joins us to shed light on Legionnaire's disease - a potentially fatal lung infection caused by bacteria that thrive in stagnant water systems.
Dee expertly breaks down the perfect storm conditions that make village halls particularly vulnerable: infrequent usage leading to water stagnation, aging infrastructure, and the presence of nutrients like rust and limescale that feed bacteria growth. She explains why this matters so critically for community spaces that often serve vulnerable populations, including the elderly and those with respiratory conditions.
What makes this episode essential listening for every trustee is the clear explanation of your legal responsibilities. As Dee reveals, the Health and Safety Executive has recently recruited 250 new inspectors specifically targeting compliance in areas including water safety. She demystifies the process of becoming compliant, walking through practical steps from risk assessments to temperature monitoring and system maintenance, all while emphasizing cost-effective solutions that won't break the bank for charitable organizations.
The conversation covers everything from understanding basic legal requirements to specific maintenance procedures for water tanks, calorifiers, and pipework. You'll learn about the crucial temperature parameters (hot water above 50°C, cold water below 20°C), proper cleaning protocols, and the importance of regular flushing and record-keeping. Dee even offers village halls access to free introductory presentations and affordable training options to help trustees get started on the path to compliance.
Don't miss this vital episode that could literally save lives in your community. Subscribe to The Village Halls Podcast for more essential guidance on managing and maintaining your community space.
Hi, I'm Marc Smith and welcome to the Village Halls podcast sponsored by Allied Westminster, the UK's largest specialist provider of Village Hall insurance, and the home of Village Guard. Before we begin, a quick reminder that entries are now open for the Village Halls Inspiration Awards 2025, celebrating the incredible work happening in village community and church halls across the country. You can apply between the 1st of May and the 30th of September, so do consider putting your hall forward. In this episode, we are tackling a subject that every village hall trustee needs to be aware of, even if it's not the most glamorous. We're talking about Legionnaire's Disease, the risks it can pose in buildings like ours and what you should be doing to keep your water system safe.
Marc Smith:Joining me today is Dee Thornton, an experienced professional in water safety and Legionella risk management. Dee offers services, including Legionella risk assessments and training, helping organisations ensure water systems are safe and compliant. You can learn more about her work at deethorntoncouk. So, whether your haul is used every day or once a week, this is one episode you don't want to miss. Welcome to the podcast, Dee.
Dee Thornton:Thank you very much indeed.
Marc Smith:So, to start with us, we need to learn what Legionnaires actually is and how does it spread?
Dee Thornton:Okay, legionella pneumophilia is a bacteria and it's a bacteria that's actually in water. It is quite. Legionella pneumophilia is quite a serious lung disorder. Ok, and you get it in the water system of buildings. It in the water system of buildings when Legionella, as it's a form of pneumonia, okay, you only get it by breathing it in. Okay, you can't get it by drinking it.
Marc Smith:That's good to know.
Dee Thornton:That's what I thought Now, because our environment is getting warmer and there's a lot of stagnation in water systems of empty buildings, empty rooms, cold water tanks are not moving. That is where the concern is Now. Legionella will grow OK, it used to be every five days, it's now every three days in very warm environments but it does need food. Foods are stagnation, lime scale, algae, warmth, temperatures between 20 and 45 degrees to allow it to multiply, and that's why it's quite important to make sure your building is safe to make sure your building is safe, right, right.
Marc Smith:So I suppose the stagnation part I was reading about. I was reading about Kenny Legionella's the last week or so and one of the things that it mentioned online was that there were old pipework in buildings. They could sit there. They're just capped off, not used, and I would imagine that village halls that the age that they are that would be a particular problem. It's kind of which is kind of village hall specific that it's not used all that much as well these buildings the thing is, is that it?
Dee Thornton:it depends where you've got old pipe work. Is that the new, one of the nutrients is also rust, okay, and so as the Legionella is feeding off it, it's eating it and it's multiplying because it's got food. It's a very happy bug, if you call it like that. It's not always just in old pipework. It can be in a cold water tank, it can be in new pipework. It can be in a cold water tank, it can be in new pipework, but there's beams of heat coming through the attic or through the heating system, and so all of those gather, but it's the stillness of the water that allows it to grow.
Marc Smith:All right, so it can feed on rust as well. Yes, it can. You're losing battle there, isn't it? Because if it can feed on those types of things, then you really are struggling. So I suppose would you say that older buildings are more at risk than newer buildings, or is it a fear for any building?
Dee Thornton:really it's basically any building. One thing I'm just going to make really quite clear is what, boring as it might be, this is a statutory law, okay, and so anyone who actually owns a building where the public are going in, you have to comply to the health and safety executive and the laws around that, and it is statutory, as I just said, and so you have to make sure that you're assessing the risk of that building as public are coming into it, because you are liable to make sure that water is of a good standard, that the person who's turning on the tap, okay, in the wash hand basin or in the kitchen that's being used, is going to be safe.
Marc Smith:Yeah, so, that being said, the trustees in the hall are legally responsible for I suppose we'll move on to testing. So how? What would the trustee need to do to either to test or to make sure that the risk is at a minimum that is easy reading, not 65 or 650 pages of you know God, I've got to learn.
Dee Thornton:All of this is a document that's called and you can download it for free from the HSC. It's called the Duty Holder Legionella Control Duty Holder, and on that document it says on page two, halfway down, exactly what they have to do, ok, and also their legal responsibilities. And so instead of having to download every single page on the HSE website, it's just five pages and page two is significant to what you have to do in that building and those things are okay. You must make sure that some form of assessment has been, risk assessment has been completed, um, to make sure that the quality of the water on the flow of the water system is of a standard OK. You have to make sure the temperatures are controlled. You must be aware and I know this comes on later, but I'll mention it now anyway that somebody knows what they're talking about within the hall and that comes through some form of training.
Dee Thornton:Now, somebody was asking me the other day. They said but Dee, I've just looked through the whole of the HSC pages and I'm sure he had Not the five pages, that 650. And he said I can't see exactly where the legality is. I have to read everything. Okay, and become fully qualified. You don't, but you must be aware of how to deal with the compliance.
Marc Smith:Right, right, so you have to get it. Someone, I suppose, needs to volunteer for this as a trustee to be able to do this and to understand the requirements really.
Dee Thornton:You have to understand the requirements of the HSC and what you have to do to get around it, and I've got to be honest with you, it is not difficult, it is not hard. I do training courses, other people do. It's making sure it's very simple to understand so that you're not having to have huge costs going out your door. Okay, compliant, but you must understand what the process of the compliance is and what you have to do. So it includes risk assessment, it includes maintaining your weight water system, and that includes cold water tanks, calorifiers, spray taps um, if you've got a shower, which is unlikely, but it might be in a community center, um, it must. You must comply to the temperatures, as I've said, make sure your system is clean of those nutrients that I mentioned earlier, and also to be able to do ongoing maintenance and monitoring on a weekly, a monthly, a quarterly or annually, depending on what you've got in your village hall.
Marc Smith:All right, see, you mentioned temperature there. This is something I was watching on YouTube. So you get your hot water, you put your little probe in the hot water, you let it get to 50 degrees. Yeah, if it's not 50 degrees, you turn the temperature up. Nice and simple. In my head, anyway, the cold water in my head. If it's over 20 degrees, say it's a really warm day, and it's over 20 degrees, how do you get that water colder? Or do degrees? How do you get that water colder? Or do you just let it run to get the bacteria out of the of the supply? What's? Is it a secret to doing that? Because it didn't. I couldn't figure out in my head how that was to work.
Dee Thornton:all right, the law stands that a water company that's, the provider of the water must deliver the water to the meter at less than 20 degrees. Ah right, number one, okay. So, whatever happens, that temperature has got to be less than 20 to comply with Legionella. Okay.
Marc Smith:Right.
Dee Thornton:And it also controls the bugs for them in the mains water system. So your temperature then comes in. Okay, to the first point of call. If you haven't got a cold water tank and the cold water tank might be providing the water for the wash hand basins, yep, okay, most probably a high probability your kitchen tap will come direct from that mains. Yeah, so that temperature probe should come at less than 20 degrees. Yeah, all right, because the provider's brought it into that tap. If it's higher, then what you're doing is you're flushing it down, you're pushing so like a stream, okay, or something to move the water aggressively. You actually provide, you turn on the tap and you make sure that the temperature's going down. So it's going down. So it might be 23 or 24 on a hot day. Yeah, okay, and sometimes a water provider cannot get the temperature at less than 22, 23 degrees. Okay, because it's so boiling hot that it's actually the ground is actually warming it up.
Marc Smith:Yeah.
Dee Thornton:All right, but the more you flush it, the more you'll be able to bring that down up. Yeah, all right, but the more you flush it, the more you'll be able to bring that down, and that's also the point of monitoring with the log books from the hsc. Okay, they're complicated log books, but you know that I try to make them a simple form, um, and so what you do is you log it and if it's 23, you've done your job because you've actually done what was asked for you for the compliance.
Dee Thornton:Yeah yeah, and so what you're looking to do is to protect yourself, right Hence why the temperature?
Marc Smith:Yeah, you mentioned the logbook. There Is that part of the legal requirement as well to just to log every whoever does the checks and when they've done this yeah, that's that.
Dee Thornton:It's called a logbook. It's a sheet of paper, okay, and it's got temperatures and you take them from the kitchen tap, you might take them from the wash hand basin, you might take them from the sentinel end and so, depending on what your building looks like is where you're taking the monitoring of the temperatures.
Marc Smith:Right, right, and this person can have. Obviously, you do training yourself to make things simpler, but the person doesn't need to have any official accreditation to do this. It's just a basic training with the document.
Dee Thornton:One of your questions you've asked me is you know about risk assessments? How do you start? And actually I had somebody on a training course yesterday saying, dee, could I do a risk assessment? And they are available from the HSE website. But the reality is, is that to get somebody to do a risk assessment and they're not um, it depends on the complexity of the building. If you've got calorifiers, which are hot water tanks, if you've got cold water tanks that are providing the water to the wash hand basins, you've got kitchenette or a kitchen, you've got three or four toilets, I would say get somebody in, okay, a professional um, and make sure the risk assessment is is readable, but thereafter you can then decide right, okay, this is what I've got, this is my basic, basic, and off I go with my maintenance and my monitoring, okay, my cleaning. So if you get the basics done first, through training and also risk assessment, it can help excellent that's good then.
Marc Smith:Now I'm going to move on to smart monitoring. That's one of my my passions is this, this smart stuff, everything, uh, although all we're on a, a podcast just now, but we have the video on I'm not sure if you've noticed the light going off and on because I'm standing still. It's because everything's smart and I I really do think it's a benefit. But I know you can get smart systems for water heaters, so, rather than you know you don't have to run the tap just to get that temperature, you can monitor it from an app. Are those still? Are those legal in the world of monitoring for Legionella, or is that something that's just like a? I don't think it's a quirk, but it could be seen as that.
Dee Thornton:All right, two things here I'll say right at the beginning let's get the basics done first. Okay, and the basics are the amount of village halls that don't have compliance.
Marc Smith:Okay, number one Okay number one.
Dee Thornton:Okay, and I know there's quite a few. All right, so we haven't got the basics, which are the risk assessments. We haven't got the cleaning of the calorifier done on an annual basis. We haven't got the cold water tank. So, once you've got the basics done, water tank. So once you've got the basics done, it's, it's it's. Even though you naturally have an ambition towards smart metering, okay, the reality is, is it's the cost to it and how smart metering works in water monitoring is that sensors are put on the pipework to be able to take the temperatures, that then the data goes back to one remote system yeah, all right, and then it's managed and told through and the data is then reported through. Okay, your temperatures are not within the legal requirements. Okay, if a building is not used, but there are. If people can get volunteers, okay, this is not a big job. Okay, if somebody's local to the building and they can call, they can go into that building once a month, but they still.
Marc Smith:If it's the building's not used at all, it would need weekly flushing anyway it's flushing, just literally open up the tap, leaving it for a few minutes, and turn off.
Dee Thornton:That's all it is right, right yeah, and you have to record it, you know. So you know you can't just um, you know, say I've done the flashing, and then you are audited every other year after you've done your risk assessment and somebody says well, where's the paperwork? To say you did do the flushing.
Marc Smith:Right right.
Dee Thornton:Okay, because I can't see it. Yeah, yeah, and so that's the difficulty. And if that person, somebody's going in to do the flushing, then why can't they be trained to do the monitoring? Yeah, I do appreciate what you're saying about smart metering and I think there is a place for it, especially when you've got very large buildings. But in this instance we're talking about village halls and community halls that may not be used. That you know. That might not need that form of technology, but it is available.
Marc Smith:Yeah, it was actually a campsite that I saw on originally, who were heating the water tanks for Legionnaires.
Marc Smith:And that's what put it in my head, that's what put it in my head, but they were being used every day and he couldn't get them to work and that's why I was in there helping him. But you were saying there that a lot of village halls are not actually compliant. So what's the main bits that are missing then when you go into village hall? Is it just the paperwork that they've not really done, or is there anything from the risk assessment?
Dee Thornton:you know, the thing is is I had a village hall the other day that actually, in this particular village hall, was actually owned by the parish council, right, and it was the cost of getting themselves to the standard of compliance. They had four calorifiers. Calorifier is a big water heater Right, all right, never been cleaned, full of nutrients, going through to spray taps, going through to showers. Yeah, the temperatures weren't at the right level and the cost just to get those calorifiers to that standard was going to be quite enormous. So let's just put our head down and not think about it.
Marc Smith:Right, right Right.
Dee Thornton:There are ways around it, Okay, and it's whether you know you can get rid of some of the bit large hot water temperature and calorifiers and then put in small point of use if the showers aren't linked to it.
Dee Thornton:Yeah, and most hotels won't have it. Okay, if you've got a cold water tank that is um providing water not just to the toilets but also to the wash hand basins, that wash hat, that cold water tank has to be cleaned because it's in the eaves and it's not got insulation. It might not follow water regulations because it's been over up there till a year, since a year dot, and then the water stagnation and the algae and the dead pigeons and everything else sits into the cold water tank that's never been cleaned, yeah, and the heat goes up. That's going out to a spray tap. It might also go down to a disabled toilet.
Dee Thornton:Then there are solutions around it. Do we need the cold water tank? Do we want to keep it? Can we cut it off? Can we put it on mains? Yeah, what are our solutions? Now, some of this won't be put onto a risk assessment. I put it on mine, okay, because I give alternative suggestions for so that people can think of the cost effectiveness of it. But the reality is is that if you haven't got that in place for a start, then we haven't got a starting ground. We, we can't. We can't move forward because you have to have the risk assessment and you have to treat it as a living document that gets worked all the time all right.
Marc Smith:Right, when you say clean the the water tank, do you mean drain it and then like, basically scrub any lime scales off the side of the the tank itself? Or is it a chemical you put in? Or do you just leave the water open for an hour? What's?
Dee Thornton:right the way the system works. Is that, firstly, okay in a cold water tank? Um, some of them are very, very, very old and actually some of them are still cast iron right okay, okay, I'm seeing it. And also rust cast iron yeah, nutrients here we go.
Dee Thornton:All right, then we, if it's a plastic one, has it got a lid on it? Has it got a vent on it? Is it compliant to water regulations? Okay, then you open the lid and you've got, um, you've got a feast, yeah, okay. Basically, you've got limescale everywhere, if you are in a high limescale area, and it just needs cleaning. So what you do in a situation like that? You basically un-lid it, all, right, you put the disinfection, you clean it out, right, okay, you put the disinfection in. You take all of the sediment from the bottom. Okay, that again, don't forget that.
Dee Thornton:Cold water tanks draw down, okay, from the bottom. The top stays very still, okay, and when the top stays very still, it has everything on it. Ok, it has birds, it has spiders, it has lime, it has a film, it has algae and all of those around the edges. Now, as it's drawn from the bottom, ok, it goes down to. It goes down to all the pipe work. You put the disinfection in.
Dee Thornton:Okay, you being a water treatment company, because you're going to need a certificate afterwards. Yeah, it's all in the down services, all in the pipe work. You take it all through to every single outlet. You turn off all the taps and you leave it for two hours. All right, right, all right, because it's eating all of the rubbish in all the pipe work, right, all right. You then turn them all on, you drain it down, you refill it with water, okay, and then what happens is you have it with water, okay. And then what happens is that you have little matchsticks Okay, and each little matchstick, okay, if this is done properly, okay, has got a little felt in, and then the water treatment company goes along and just touches all of the taps to make sure all the disinfection is cleaned through the whole system. All right, right, yeah. And then what you will get is a certificate to say I have been disinfected, and that's how a cold water tank gets cleaned.
Marc Smith:All right, I might start bringing bottled water to when I'm out and about. It sounds horrible, doesn't it really?
Dee Thornton:Oh, no, no.
Marc Smith:It's good that you have that, though you can. If you've got an old system, it can be saved. You don't have to rip it out and put a new system in. You can.
Dee Thornton:No, you don't If it can be adapted, then so be it. If it can't, and or it's going to be costly, then you don't do it. I'll give you another example. I know we're talking about legionella, but you know people say right, I'm using my village hall for nurseries, okay, you're doing the squash for kids, okay. And it says drinking water OK, drink here, it's all right. And I went oh, really.
Dee Thornton:Have you tested it? And that's called a total viable count, tvc. No, we haven't. Now it's not a legal requirement. But I tell you what I would prefer to know once a year that the water that's been delivered to my tap is good. Now it's not nothing to do with Legionella, but it's to do with drinking water, and if you've got a little kid coming up and she's drinking the water, you don't want to have any bugs in that water.
Marc Smith:No, exactly, yeah, and once a year.
Dee Thornton:it's not going to cause that much financial harm to a village hall to have it done, and then you can put your sticker up there yeah, yeah.
Marc Smith:Should a should a hall have put on display that the the the water system has been checked, is that is it. Should it be no?
Dee Thornton:you don't need to do it, you're just expected to do it because, you see, the thing is, the hsc have now just recruited 250 inspectors to check for the five elements of need which are asbestos, fire, electricity water I don't know what the fourth or fifth one is. So if they will come in and they can do spot checks, have you done this.
Dee Thornton:Have you done that? Can do spot checks. Have you done this? Have you done that? Okay. And then they go work and they come back in again and say, um, yeah, okay, we've done it or we haven't done it. And if they haven't, you haven't done it, then you've got a certain amount of weeks to get it done by. But they will come back and make sure that you have, and they'll just look at the paperwork.
Marc Smith:So that's why it's very important to keep that paperwork. Well, the first, the first way is to also keep it.
Dee Thornton:And there's also the knowledge. So well, how did you do the risk assessment or not? How did you? But did you get the tank cleaned? Okay, can I have the certificate for that? Where's your risk assessment? Did you have samples? Now, legionella samples? I don't know if I'm right or wrong. The majority of village halls would not have showers.
Marc Smith:Yeah.
Dee Thornton:Okay, and showers is the highest level of spray you can get for airborne you with me for airborne and so when I talked right at the beginning, you breathe it in, so you get. If you get lime scale around the head of a shower, then that will be a nutrient and it's not just what's on the outside of the shower head, it's what's on the inside and that's the problem.
Dee Thornton:okay, so I'm deviating slightly but, if a village hall or a community center have a shower, those have got to be cleaned quarterly and recorded all right right and this is all part of the training yeah, do you see what I mean? So have you got that bit? Have you got that bit? And people go, oh my god, there's a lot to take in, but there's not if you do it in the right order. Really.
Marc Smith:Yeah, you literally need a list, don't you really just to tick off that you've done these things? And I know what you're ticking off. Now here's a tangent for you. Sometimes, when you go into a building, you'll see an area it'll say not drinking water. Is that because they've not bothered to? They go okay, we can't do the testing. Well, let's say not drinking. Why is that then? What was? Because some are drinking water, and then you'll see some taps are just it says not for drinking.
Dee Thornton:Is that because it might not have been tested. They might have had problems with coliforms. There might have been e coli within the area. Very unlikely if it's E coli in the building, but it's just for washing hands. But they have said, right, well, it's not drinking water standard. There's not many people that talk about TVCs or drinking water that are out there, really, I mean. But for me personally I would prefer to know what I'm drinking is okay, really. You know, I think we're very good in this country. I think, where we do have the problems with sewage and E coli, the only reason that you're going to be worried in a building is if you've got old pipework coming into the building on the mains and it could crack and it's sitting near the sewage pipework. Who says it won't distort and crack? And then you've got a problem, do you see?
Marc Smith:do you see?
Dee Thornton:what I mean. So so those so, but I don't understand where they say not drinking. They might have had a case of a problem with um with their water at some point.
Marc Smith:Yeah, that had caused them a tummy bug all right, I'll definitely not be using that for anything then.
Dee Thornton:But that's not to do with Legionella, that's to do with drinking water.
Marc Smith:Right, that's good. Thank you very much for your time here. So I think it'd be good to talk a little bit about yourself, like, what is it that you do? You've spent a lot of time on this podcast, so what can you do for village halls around the country? If they were to contact you, what? What could you do for them, especially if they're brand, if they've just heard this podcast, like, oh, we've got to do this, what? What do you offer? Well, I suppose anyone, but specifically village halls okay.
Dee Thornton:What I've recently been doing, Marc, is that I've put a taster presentation together, okay, which is a maximum of an hour and it's free. And it's free to village halls so that they can understand the legalities, what Legionella is, and also what they have to do to become compliant. That's the first thing that I've done, yeah, as well as that, I have taken the opportunity and it's not financially of interest to me to put a package together to say, oh, my goodness, we need to do this, but how do we do it and how do we get ourselves going? Yeah, and there are a lot of water treatment companies out there. Some of them are good, okay, and some of them are not so good, okay, so good, okay, where they may make the risk assessment less user-friendly, and that's really difficult, because you think you've done the risk assessment and then you can't read it because they've made it so complex that you go back to them again say, right, well, can you, can you take over the outsourcing of the whole of this?
Dee Thornton:And and I don't want that for village halls so, as well as doing this taster from the taster, then people go back to their committee or whatever the group's called within the village halls or the trustees and they say, look, we have to become compliant, I think we should go on to a training course. So I then run a two-hour training course. So I do a two-hour training course. This is what everything that you need to know okay? And then from there I get phone calls or I get emails to say, look, I need this to be done. I've got a company that would travel nationwide, okay, and do the very basic that needs to be done, and then for the village hall to take over all of the rest, right. So the foundations are done. Okay, get it sorted, let us now take ownership.
Marc Smith:So you haven't got huge costs yeah, well, what I'll do is, if it's okay with yourself, is I'll put a link on the podcast page as well. Yeah, your website where people can sign up to that was your um. What's your training? Was it like via? Could you do it via Zoom or an online portal?
Dee Thornton:Zoom, teams, okay, whatsapp, okay, you name it. Okay, mainly Zoom and Teams. I do need a minimum of about five, five, ten minimum, five, maximum 15 village halls. I'm doing a special price, okay, if we're going to talk about money at £25 per village hall, but I need to make sure that I've got enough on it to be able to accumulate, and that's for a two-hour course and you get downloaded all the paperwork as well, so that you've got a little bit of clarity.
Dee Thornton:It's a good start and then wonderful yeah and also I've got the package price for the risk assessment and if you've got a calorifier or if you've got a tank, and that's the package price as well, throughout the county so that people aren't having to pay enormous a company to do enormous travel expenses or anything like that because all of these things accumulate for a charity oh yeah, we were talking that before about about how halls struggle with funding.
Marc Smith:So, yeah, having having that is uh is ideal, and I need to say as well, this has been recorded in 2025, so in case someone listens to it, next year your price goes up. This was a 2025, just in case you never know. Well, thank you very much, uh, for your time, dean. Uh, I'm not sure if you've got any other thoughts, but I think I've rattled off all the questions I have in my mind about it. I mean, it's a. It's a. I didn't think it was this. Well, I knew about it. I didn't know about it, but I didn't know it was, how serious it was and how often you had to do things. But I take for granted, by living in a house, you'll have the tap on every day anyway, you know, and just the most basics. But the village hall, like our one, I suppose it could be a week before someone's in, so I never really thought about it.
Dee Thornton:I will say this if don't mind me. Marc is that it's the vulnerability of the type of people using a village hall yeah and if you've got elderly people, okay, who may have um breathing difficulties, immune systems, those are the vulnerable because it's a lung disorder, yeah, and so, um, you know, people have elderly, have COPD and all of those make that vulnerability really um more poignant, really, and um, it's, it's really up to the um trustees of the village halls to make sure that they protect those people. That's what I think is important.
Marc Smith:A hundred percent? Yeah, definitely. Well, thank you very much for your time, dee. Thank you very much indeed. Thank you, no worries. Many thanks to our headline sponsor and specialist village hall insurance provider, Allied Westminster, the home of Village Guard, for making this podcast possible, and to online booking system provider, Hallmaster, who also sponsor our podcast and can be found at hallmaster. co. uk. You've been listening to the Village Halls podcast, a unique listening community for Britain's village community and church halls and anyone interested in the vital services they provide. Don't forget entries for the Village Halls Inspiration Awards 2025 are open now until the 30th of September, so visit our website to find out more and get involved. We will be back again soon with another episode. For more information, visit thevillagehallspodcast. com, where you'll also find links to our social media pages. Thanks again for listening in and until next time. Goodbye for now.
