A DEBATE over the future of a much-loved town amenity saw some tempers flare.

On Wednesday night a public meeting was held at the Forum in Barrow to discuss its future.

The building has come under threat after Barrow Borough Council found out it has to make £2.3ym of cuts.

Because of this huge sum, the council can no longer guarantee the subsidy which keeps the Forum running.

It has been proposed to outsource the running of the Forum and the Park Leisure to save the council £470,000.

The meeting was chaired by Councillor Shaun Blezard, and he was joined by leader of the council Cllr Dave Pidduck, Cllr Michael Cassells and general manager of the Forum, Sandra Baines.

After Cllr Blezard opened the meeting, Cllr Pidduck explained why the council was making tough decisions.

He said: "The government at the time in 2011 decided they would look at how councils are funded. They cut the grant to councils, we were the second worst hit council in the UK."

The council lost £5m of funding, and was forced to undertake huge rounds of spending cuts.

Cllr Pidduck said: "I naively believed once we'd lost five million that nothing else would happen. We'd contributed our bit. We were wrong, central government has come back with another £2.3m of cuts."

Read what people said when the Forum's future was cast into doubt

The council is proposing to outsource the provision of services provided at the Forum. A plan they hope will keep the building functioning as a community hub.

The councillors present said they would do all they could to prevent, in Cllr Pidduck's words, "the nuclear option."

The nuclear option would be the closure of the Forum entirely, something Cllr Pidduck said would only happen if "hell froze over."

When the meeting was opened up to the public, some tempers ran hot over what should be done to protect the Forum.

Some members of the public felt the option to form a charitable trust to run the site had not been explored fully.

One man voiced an unpopular opinion that the Forum was not being used to its full potential, as it did not offer enough variety.

Cllr Cassells tried to regain calm by assuring people plans were at an early stage, and the input of the people of Barrow was essential to the council solving this problem.

He said: "We've got to make this place viable. We have to do that by any means. That means listening to criticism, but we face a very scary, very daunting task."