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March 15, 2008
130 Library closures... at least
There was a document circulating the MLA saying how wonderful CIPFA figures are-- but I don't believe there is anyone in the MLA who has ever studied them very closely.. They are certainly incomprehensible, tardy and only as accurate and complete as the data provided by councils, which is in fact quite often plain wrong.. They are also not freely available to the public and they when you do see them you find that they are truly mystifying and certainly carry no helpful comparative data about previous years etc.
The Times recently quoted a figure of over 130 public libraries being closed. This in its turn provoked another document to circulate around the MLA called 'how to counter bad news put out by horrible national journalists' (or something like that) who don't know what they are talking about and only want to rubbish public libraries
If those hopeless and brainless press officers of MLA (and DCMS) are reading this then this blog can reveal that the figure of 130 comes not from CIPFA but from the MLA sponsored LISU 'estimates' report of last autumn. The LISU report is also incomprehensible, confused, inconsistent and error bound-- but that's what it says and therefore the figure goes under the general heading of 'government data'
I paraphrase but the LISU report says 'among the limited number of English councils from which we have obtained data, those councils are planning to operate 130 less libraries in 2008 than they operated in 2006. The actual number of closures in all councils may therefore be more'
This information ties in with reports received from local newspapers.. It is not hard to see from those how the total number of closures, by 2009, from January 2006, could be over 200.
Incidentally - for the benefit of officers of the MLA and DCMS-- the 1964 Act requires the Minister who superintends the service (Mrs Mansion Polish) to obtain the data from councils in order to enable her to do that.. Isn't it time that work was done? At present the Minister has no such data, but by goodness she needs it. We know the data here, but we are the only people in the country who do.
Posted by Perkins at March 15, 2008 11:44 AM