Parents demand action over 'unsafe' play equipment

Parents are urging a council to investigate one of its leisure centres after inflatable play equipment collapsed on children during a birthday party, leaving parents struggling to free them.

One mother said it took three adults to try and lift up a rapidly-deflating bouncy house and covered slide at Activity Zone in Malmesbury, Wiltshire, earlier this month.

Ashleigh Fisher, 31, said: "As a parent, your heart is in your mouth watching it go down, and the [suffocation] risk is the first thing you worry about."

Councillor Mel Jacob from Wiltshire Council, which operates Activity Zone, apologised and said a "thorough investigation" is being carried out "to understand exactly what happened".

"The safety of children and families who use this service is of utmost importance to us," Jacob added.

Speaking to BBC Wiltshire, Ms Fisher said her five-year-old daughter was the last to get out of the deflated attraction, and was "sobbing her heart out".

She said she hadn't realised how heavy the equipment was until she had tried to lift it, and claimed staff had done nothing to help.

"The staff are quite young so I feel like they have very little care or experience maybe, and I don't think they're qualified people to be monitoring a bouncy castle, let alone with all the children on it," she said.

"I've been to a few parties there and the amount of times I've seen [staff] sitting on their phones - they're not actually directly looking at the bouncy castle."

Fisher said that the staff member in charge was "nonchalant" in his response to the deflating equipment, and only moved to reconnect it to the pump.

"We didn't have anyone come up to us and explain what happened, we didn't have anyone come and check if the children were okay, because there's quite a few children crying," she said.

After posting about the incident on social media, Fisher received multiple responses from other parents telling her they experienced the same problem at Activity Zone on different occasions.

Jacob said: "We are very sorry to hear about this incident and the distress it has caused.

"We are carrying out a thorough investigation to understand exactly what happened."

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