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July 15, 2006
CIPFA
No one can remember what "CIPFA" stands for, but it is the body that publishes figures about the public library service in the whole UK (and Ireland, too, I believe)
It is a private body that charges councils for its work. It doesn't answer to government and the figures it produces are not freely available in the public domain.
In other words there are no public or government statistics about the performance of public libraries. If you want to know how your council has performed, you have to pay to find out.
The Minister has a legal duty to ensure we all receive a "comprehensive and efficient" service, but he has no information with which to carry out that duty. He also has to purchase the data that CIPFA produce.
The CIPFA figures are produced late, they are incomprehensible and several councils don't bother to send their figures, so they are incomplete.
Yet we pay £1.2bn every year for this service. This is cost on the scale of Marks and Spencers and the John Lewis Partnership. Can you imagine that the shareholders of these companies would tolerate a managing director who told them there are no figures about the performance of the company?
At the moment there are no published figures about public libraries which describe activity later than March 2005. That is 18 months ago. So when the board of the MLA meet and congratulate themselves on the "good news" of the library service- what are they talking about? Biscuits on the table at the meeting?
Last year the civil servants responsible for libraries in the DCMS were told by Parliament to "Raise their game". So when they review the performance of MLA, to whom they delegate that responsibility, what information do they look at? (They certainly don't look at this blog!)
Why doesn't the Minister say "Excuse me, where are the figures?"
How can the library service operate without a current, timely and accurate source of management information? How can decisions be made about closures, or how to allocate resources or whether or not to recruit or appoint people, without information about how the service is performing?
Why does this go on year after year? Why don't senior, highly paid managers all over the country do their job? Or why don't they just all go and let us run the library service ourselves
Resign guys. All of you. And sack the others before you go.
Posted by Perkins at July 15, 2006 9:00 AM