A new mum has been left frustrated after being contacted by debt collectors due to an unpaid swimming membership she claims she cancelled months ago.

Emma Diamond has been instructed to cough up more than £75 for not paying leisure centre fees since February.

The mum-of-three, from Albany Road in Sittingbourne, stopped paying for her swim-only membership at Swallows Leisure Centre four months ago after the birth of her daughter, Delilah.

After struggling to find an area on the website to cancel her £22 a month membership, she discovered the only way to do so was by submitting an online form. She paid for February, as set out in her contract, and then cancelled her direct debit.

The 33-year-old said: “I applied for my membership about a year ago when I was pregnant as I worked at home and I wanted to be able to go somewhere that I could swim on my lunch break.

“I cancelled it at the end of January when my newborn was about three, or four weeks old.

“You can join up on the membership really, really easily. But to cancel it, you have to go through the web form, which is a little bit clunky, and I think that's kind of where the issue has come.”

Emma, a surveyor, cancelled the membership as she knew she wouldn’t have time to use the facilities with a new baby and her two young boys, Jack, five, and Oscar, three.

She explained: “I was searching through their website and it was quite difficult to even find where you need to cancel it.

“You couldn't get a direct email address so I had to use the web form that they provide you with.

“All that appeared after I submitted it was a message that came up on the screen that said something along the lines of ‘It's been submitted successfully, your message has been received, we'll be in touch shortly’.”

Emma took a screenshot of the message as proof she’d contacted Swallows and never received any further form of contact from the fitness complex.

She was only contacted after March 1 as she’d cancelled her direct debit.

Emma continued: “Swallows contacted me by email to say I hadn't paid my membership and I owed them.

“I explained that I’d cancelled and sent them the screenshot of my form submission and they told me they hadn’t actually received it.

“They then argued that my screenshot didn’t show that I’d cancelled it.”

Emma tried to fight her corner, explaining she had no other reason to contact the leisure centre and there was no other confirmation she was provided with by Swallows to prove this and it was the leisure centre’s system at fault.

Staff at Swallows told her if she wanted to make a complaint then she could do so through the same online form she’d tried to cancel her membership with.

She said: “I asked for a direct email address as I didn’t want to use the web form, because it was the root of the issue, and they said that it needed to be by the web form again. I made that complaint on May 6 and I still haven’t heard back.”

A few days after Emma did this she received an email from a debt collection agency saying she owed £76.95.

She explained: “I politely responded and said there is an ongoing dispute and explained the situation and that I still hadn’t heard from Swallows.

“It’s just a little bit frustrating. When I first raised the issue with Swallows they did say that I could cancel it again, but that I’d have to give another month's notice.

“That was at the beginning of March and they said I'd have to pay again at the end of April. And I still ‘owed’ the money for the beginning of March. So they wanted two months’ payment.

“I said no because I'd already cancelled it and I didn’t want to pay extra. I hadn't been using the services.

“It's a little bit cheeky. I just don't think this is an appropriate way to be treating people.”

Swallows has been contacted six times by KentOnline but the leisure centre has not provided a comment.