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April 3, 2007
DCMS Throws Book at Lammy
is the headline in tonight's London Evening Standard. The diarist of that newspaper writes:
"Has Culture Minister David Lammy quietly been relieved of his responsibilities for maintaining public libraries? (This paper) has frequently pointed out the Labour MP for Tottenham's deficiencies in this regard, not least when last year he was forced to admit he had misled Parliament on the subject.
He told MP's the number of books in libraries was going up when in fact it was going down by 20 miliion books. Now rumours reach (us) that Lammy's department, Culture, Media and Sport, will no longer set policy on standards of public libraries but the responsibility will fall instead to Ruth Kelly's Department of Local Government. "There is no current policy and policy for the future will be determined at some point in the next two years, in line with the Government white paper on communities" says my source. When (we) call Lammy's office (we are) directed to a DCMS spokesman. He says "There has been no downgrading of Lammy's responsibilities with regards to libraries. Libraries are funded by local government"
Whomever funds libraries, the law says that the Minister in charge of them (from whichever deaprtment) is responsible for "superintending" the library service and ensuring that it is "comprehensive", "efffcient" and "improving". (and he is empowered by the same law to obtain information from councils in order to fulfil this role)
One of the strange features of the the public library service is that people who operate it say those words are not sufficiently clear for them to know what they are supposed to do. I should think anyone else would would find them perfectly straightforward (even my cat probably)
Perhaps if the DCMS and Mr Lammy don't understand such difficult words, someone in another Department will. The Minister's recent habit of telling Parliament that he doesn't know how councils are performing because he doesn't have the information makes it sound as if he is not familiar with what he has been asked to do.
Posted by Tim Coates at April 3, 2007 7:20 PM