« Mansion Polish Margaret is given the wrong figures | Main | Even Mr Lammy said sorry »
September 12, 2007
Spit and Polish
My contempt for Margaret Hodge's letter to the Observer - which I am printing again here--- is doubled in the flurry of phone calls yesterday. These included the revelation that not only have the officials not given her the correct figures but neither has she asked for, nor seen nor read the report of The Culture Select Committee of March 2005. -- And as a consequence-- being so completley misinformed and misled-- this is what she wrote
"Sunday September 9, 2007
The Observer
Much more shelf life
Rachel Cooke's gloomy view of the public library service ('Fiction belongs in libraries - not in council policy', 26 August) is not borne out by the facts.
There are 1.5 million more books in libraries today than when this government came into office in 1997, while visits have risen by 7.5 per cent in the last five years. I can't quite see how this squares with a service being 'systematically dismantled'. We, too, commend councils like Hillingdon for modernising and improving their service to local people and I agree there is much that other local authorities could learn from their experience. But Hillingdon has placed the focus on book provision, prioritising this over, for example, outreach work to open libraries to people who in the past never saw them as relevant to them. This is their decision to make, working with their communities, but libraries in the 21st century are about more than the printed word, as those who actually use them understand.
I know there are those who long for a return to the smell of Mansion Polish and a tweedy librarian shooshing anyone whose voice rises above a whisper, but that boat has sailed.
So a 'one size fits all' approach is never going to work nationwide because the needs and customer profile of a library in Toxteth, for example, are not necessarily going to be the same as those in Tonbridge.
Margaret Hodge
Minister for Culture
Posted by Tim Coates at September 12, 2007 8:49 AM