GREENOCK Sports Centre will not reopen until 2013, after even more repair work was found to be needed.

The Nelson Street centre was originally meant to be closed for just six weeks to allow repairs to the building fabric and existing facilities. This was later revised to the end of October, but now the building will not be open until next year.

An Inverclyde Council spokesman said: "The work at the sports centre has taken longer than expected. During the redevelopment work, some other issues came up which we needed to address. It is better that we tackled these now and the work took a bit longer.

"Opening earlier and causing more inconvenience with repair work or even another closure wasn't acceptable to us and wouldn't have been to service users.

"We are working through some electrical work right now and hope to be in a better position soon to hand the building back over to our colleagues in Inverclyde Leisure. "Though we would like to have the centre back and re-opened this side of the New Year, until the work is complete we can't be exact because there's a possibility of other issues emerging which we will want to fix.

"We'd like to reassure residents that we are working to make sure that the centre is in the best possible shape for them to enjoy as soon as we can." The �700,000 project was originally meant to be a 14-week total refurbishment programme consisting of a six-week closure period, followed by eight weeks of phased works.

The revamp is part of Inverclyde Council's ongoing multi-million pound investment in the area's sports and leisure infrastructure.