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March 29, 2007
Libraries and Trusts
There is a fashion around to put libraries that are the responsibility of local councils into trusts.
This article and the comments which follow are very interesting.
I confess I hadn't heard of the of the Scottish libraries act of 1887.
The possibility of different management arrangements for public libraries was one of the topics upon which I gave evidence in my submission to the Culture Select Committee of 2004. I'll try and find the reference. My thesis was that these schemes take up tremendous time and council energy but if you have the same management running them as before there will be no benefit to the public for all the effort. Incidentally the tax gain, to which these articles refer, for libraries which comes from VAT and from council tax, in the case of libraries is tiny. They don't pay VAT on books and the council tax on library buildings is, relatively, very little. The legisation called TUPE, which applies to staff contracts, generally applies.
The ones I've seen have been half baked attempts at councils wanting to appear to be enterprising. In my view they should concentrate on being enterprising and raising the standards of their work within their regime of civic and administrative duty.
Here is the same story in the Glasgow Herald
Posted by Tim Coates at March 29, 2007 4:23 PM