Pressure is mounting on a council to reopen a popular pool in time for the summer holidays.

The leisure pool at Crown Pools in Ipswich has been closed for about three weeks after it was discovered small pieces of debris were falling in the water.

That meant the pool had to be drained and a cherry picker brought in to help clear up the problems.

Ipswich Borough Council, which manages the facility, said work is ongoing to get the pool open in time for the end of the school term.

But the pressure to get the problems fixed in time for the summer rush, with 6,000 iCards distributed to children aged between five and 16 allowing them to access hundreds of sports sessions for free this summer, including swimming.

An IBC spokesman said: “We are doing everything possible to get the Leisure Pool open in time for the school holidays next week.

“We have undertaken extensive examinations that point to the hot weather causing some maintenance issues, which have now been resolved.

“We will be undertaking some further routine work on the outside of the building in the coming weeks so will be taking further action to ensure the safety of our customers.”

John Stebbings, sport and leisure operations manager at IBC, said: “We have had a number of problems here that have been very unfortunate.

“With the very hot weather we had a number of small pieces of debris fall in the pool, so obviously we had to investigate that.

“We were initially able to do this with water in the pool - we had people up there on ropes trying to find out what it was but they were unable to reach the area the debris came down from, so this meant we had to drain the pool and get a specialist cherry picker in.”

To keep customers and maintenance staff safe the pool has had to be drained and refilled, a process that takes over 10 days to complete.

Further work will be carried out on the roof of the pool over the summer, but will be completed externally and can be done with the leisure pool open again.

The council apologised for the inconvenience over the past three weeks, stating maintenance work had to be restricted to outside opening hours so the Competition Pool could remain open.