There are some 1982 private health clubs in the UK according to the Fitness Industry Association

There are some 1,982 private health clubs in the UK, according to the Fitness Industry Association (FIA), and about half of them are independently owned. But Brigid Simmonds, of the trade body Business in Sport and Leisure, said the prospects for further gym membership growth were still enormous. “With continued efforts by the Government and the NHS to encourage people to have more active lifestyles and the increasing awareness on health issues, it is likely that the sector will continue to grow,” she said.LA Fitness has opened 49 clubs in the past two years and has promised more. The private sector accounts for more than half the health club business, with about 3.5 million people in privately run gyms.

Membership fees are still often expensive, and can run to more than £50 a month, and the sector has also been plagued by fears that amid a downturn in consumer spending, gym memberships would be the first item of disposable income to be reined in. The sector has great prospects and is beginning to recover from when it was hit by too much supply.”Membership of health clubs has almost doubled since 1998, and now about one person in 10 belongs to a gym, including local authority-run facilities. They have already risen more than four fold since a low of 54p this time last year. As the competition peeled away from the quoted arena, LA Fitness became the only devoted home for investors wanting to tap in to the health club sector. So why is LA Fitness quitting now, just when the Government is pushing the nation off its sofas and into a more healthy, active lifestyle that its gyms can provide?James Ainley, an analyst at Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein, said: “The timing is quite surprising. Analysts reckon a bidder for LA Fitness may have to pay as much as 270p a share, making Mr Turok’s 16 per cent shareholding worth nearly £18m.Shares in LA Fitness, which, with 70 clubs and 200,000 members, is one of the largest chains in the UK, shot up 15 per cent to 246p yesterday.

At least one of the interested parties has demanded that Mr Turok stay on board as a condition of its bid, so he has been removed from the decision-making process that could land him a multimillion pound windfall. LA Fitness, the health club operator, may soon be the last in the sector to step off the treadmill of being a publicly listed company. Esporta, Holmes Place, Fitness First and Cannons have all delisted after seeing their share prices run out of steam and have gone into private hands.But Fred Turok, the fitness enthusiast who founded LA Fitness in 1990, has always vowed “not to follow the herd”, promising several times to keep his company publicly quoted.It was Peter Jacobs, the chairman of LA Fitness, who was left to explain to shareholders yesterday that the company is now considering a number of takeover approaches, which “may or may not lead to an offer”. So small was the equity value of the company that it could not buy Novar shares in the market to cover its own bid costs in the event that it was outgunned by a higher offer.As for Mr Howard, an American by birth, his bonus has come just in time to enjoy a Christmas shopping spree in New York, where the buying power of the British pound has rarely been stronger Melrose, by contrast, gets nothing at all for its trouble. It seems that fortune doesn’t always favour the brave.jeremy.warner independent.co.uk.

Honeywell reckons it can squeeze an extra $100m a year of profit out of what will be left of Novar once its aluminium extrusions and cheque printing businesses have been got rid off.Melrose’s bid was essentially a management buy-in. In fact, the irony of the situation is that whereas Melrose says it would have kept Novar largely intact, it is the white knight in the shape of Honeywell which plans to break the business into pieces and sell off everything apart from intelligent building systems (that’s fire alarms and CCTV to the rest of us). Honeywell’s is the asset stripping exercise.For Melrose, a bid vehicle which was put together by a handful of big institutions, most of them with shareholdings in Novar, there are some lessons to be learnt One is that its capital structure may have to be altered. In fact, the company’s shareholders, and its chief executive, owe their good fortune almost entirely to the rival bidder Melrose, without whom Honeywell would never have been flushed out this quickly, if at all.Led by an asset stripper who cut his teeth under James Hanson and another who built up the mini-conglomerate Wassall, Melrose was the kind of corporate raider that no quoted company likes to see coming round the corner. Say it in dollars, the currency in which Honeywell is paying, and it sounds even better.Novar would like us to think that the bonus is justified on the grounds that Honeywell is paying £300m more for the company than it was worth when Mr Howard took the reins on 4 November. It is only a shame that more couldn’t have been made out of it as an independently quoted British company.Novar/HoneywellThe £810,000 bonus that Novar’s new chief executive Stephen Howard stands to make from the Honeywell takeover is not bad going for just five weeks’ work. There was a lot of talk in the City yesterday of the “winner’s curse”, the idea that in an auction between Deutsche and Euronext the victor will end up overpaying and regretting it I doubt that The LSE remains a great business franchise.