The Good Library Blog

UPDATE August 2006: Phil Kerridge

"This comment is typical of many to be found on the Museums, Libraries and Archive’s Council’s (MLA) love libraries website after their recent transformation of Newquay, Richmond and Coldharbour libraries.

“Fabulous as ever. New library brill! Staff excellent, service with a smile, books superb. Thank You!”

Working for Cornwall ’s library service but not on the Newquay Love Libraries project I am aware of colleagues’ inspiration and sheer hard work not only to complete the renovation but also to bid for the funding in the first place. The result is brilliant, Newquay library’s interior is unrecognisable from its previous incarnation as a faded and jaded 1960s glass palace.
I start straying off message when I hear claims that here we have a recipe or a model to transform every library in the country. My emergent heresy is even occasionally shared on the Love Libraries website. D Clarke sagely reminds us that “Improving just three libraries is not tackling the real issues facing the public library service. My local authority is struggling to provide an adequate service as a result of budget cuts and high overhead costs. For example, the book stocks in the lending library have been reduced by 20% in the past five years.”
So what are the real issues facing the public library service? Are the current national initiatives likely to help? Are they just icing on the cake? Or what is the state of the cake? And how long is it before it crumbles?
The refrain of decaying buildings, falling book funds, inadequate opening hours and falling use albeit recently boosted by the People’s Network has been around for years and nothing has radically changed.
Less well known but quite apparent from Loughborough University ’s LISU is the variation in spending levels amongst the 149 English library authorities. London libraries spend more per capita at £25 in 2002/2003 than English counties at less than £15. Metropolitan districts and unitary authorities are somewhere in between. Why is this so? Why are libraries nearly 50% more expensive to run in urban areas compared to rural ones? Is this replicated in the world of bookshops? Perhaps ex Waterstone’s boss, Tim Coates, could tell us?
Even amongst counties there is enormous variation is spending. Strangely those counties spending the most also tend to spend the most per capita. Based on 2004/2005 projected spends from LISU and 2004 mid term population estimates: of thirteen authorities spending more than £10 million only one has a per capita spend of less than £15 per head. Of the 20 low spenders, below £10 million, all but 4 spend less than £15 per capita. I wonder why larger high spending county councils fail to achieve economies of scale?
In 2006 things have begun to crumble big time. More than 100 public libraries have been threatened with closure. Many are to be found in rural counties, not only with traditional low spending levels but also hardest hit by recent government grant settlements. In the next two years this will get worse. Dorset has threatened to close 13 libraries in anticipation of an £849,000 budget reduction in this and the next two years. In my own authority we had to make savings of around £250,000 in 2006/2007. In Cornwall we have not closed any libraries and have in fact opened two extra small libraries and renovated a few others. This has been possible by reducing overheads: making managerial and support posts redundant, reducing the costs of mobile libraries by serving the county with fewer vans, rationalising staffing levels and the introduction of new technology.
It is very likely that in Cornwall the next two financial years will be as difficult as 2006/2007 – at least that is what we are being told. Thus we may well face further budget cuts of around £1/2million in the next two financial years. If that’s right preventing either cuts in book spending or library closures will be very difficult indeed. Investment in new technology would assist but the up front costs are large. Sharing costs like information technology infrastructure, which have risen sharply in Cornwall , with neighbouring councils would assist but I can see nothing on the horizon. If the council could reprieve the library service, then that would assist too but there are other enormous budget pressures like the costs of waste disposal because of new landfill taxes, the rising costs of caring for an ageing population and the widespread desire to develop Cornwall ’s civilian airport, also in Newquay. So I am pessimistic here too.
In between Dorset and Cornwall Devon has also announced library closures. There they have managed the publicity abjectly. When asked the head librarian was apparently unable to trace the criteria for selecting libraries for closure and having at last done so couldn’t explain this in a way that could remotely be described as comprehensible. Despite this Devon deserve some sympathy. LISU data suggests that they are amongst the most efficient of any library service. Their percentage spend on books and materials at 22% is way ahead of the game and close to Tim Coates’ Who’s In Charge objective of 25%. At £12.24 per head their spending is at the bottom of the counties league. So it should be no surprise that Devon is in the vanguard of the trend to close libraries.
If Cornwall and Dorset are typical then rural low spending library services face budget reductions of over £3/4million over a three year period. I can only imagine that this year’s 100 threatened library closures might be chicken feed compared to what could happen by the end of the noughties.
It may be that recent bad press publicity may offset library closures. This won’t mean however that library services are saved from reductions; just that other savings will be made almost certainly including the book fund. How long can libraries survive if book budgets are even worse than they are now? Alternatively local communities may take over their public libraries, which will be staffed by volunteers. Affluent communities will rise to the challenge and will be claiming that their libraries are in every way superior to the bad old days when they were run by those dreadful county councils. Elsewhere and more commonly it will be different; let’s get used to the new statutory library service freely available to all in urban areas and small towns, so long as they are very well-heeled.
So what is happening at the national level to avert this impending funding crisis? Answer I am afraid; not very much. In recent articles in both the Public Library Journal and CILIP (Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals) Update MLA spinners hardly deign to mention budget problems in either this year or those on the immediate horizon. Nobody has ever been very troubled about how library authorities provide a statutory service under wildly different spending regimes. Nobody questions whether there might be significant economies of scale if there were less than 149 library services in England or they co-operated to reduce costs more effectively. The general tone is one of great optimism. After all we have Framework for the Future, which has just been updated. There are platitudes galore about being at the heart of the community, reaching diverse communities of potential users, putting libraries at the heart of local government and providing the right quantity and mix of resources. There are to be fair valuable programmes that begin to address some of the right targets including Love Libraries, the £80 million Big Lottery fund for community libraries and the work done negotiating deals for online reference books for the People’s Network. Yet the MLA reminds me of Wayne Rooney playing against Portugal . They charge around with lots of enthusiasm but unfortunately most of this sometimes quite remarkable and expensive effort is either misdirected or falls woefully short of what is really needed. When they are really needed be it Wayne in a penalty shoot out or the MLA at Appledore, Burton Bradstock and Little Chalfont there they were sitting on the touchline.
So who is taking the prospect of library services, particularly in rural areas, being decimated seriously? Answer: nobody apparently but Tim Coates and the residents who have packed community halls around the country to protest about the closure of their library. Certainly not the MLA. Certainly not CILIP and most certainly not David Lammy, the minister who has done nothing this year and in whom I have every confidence that he’ll do nothing next year about any library closures or cuts.
So what are the solutions? In the library profession we all say more money! Until most people learn to prefer paying council tax to moaning about the weather I say this is unlikely. Critics like Tim Coates claim that not only can we can keep libraries open, spend more on books and increase opening hours but also do all this at a lower cost. If we really loved libraries we ought to be talking to Tim; instead the profession treats him as a pariah. In Cornwall I have never seen what we had to lose. Either he has ideas that would improve the service at the sharp end or if not and we are something like as efficient as we think we might be then we would have gained a powerful advocate to fight our corner.
A strategy of ignoring Tim Coates is also short sighted. The Tony Blair era is almost over. Gordon Brown and David Cameron will both be looking to set themselves apart from the policies of the last ten years. In doing so will they listen to the MLA and CILIP, whose frameworks and spin are widely seen to be failing library services or Tim Coates, who is actively and successfully articulating the concerns of Middle England’s residents campaigning to save their libraries?
Don’t ask me! Just listen to shadow arts minister, Mark Field, who is urging Tory councils to pull away from the MLA and DCMS (Department of Culture Media and Sport) and take failing library services into their own hands.