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March 7, 2009
The black hole of administration that is destroying public libraries
The long awaited CIPFA figures- the government statistics for public libraries- were published in the past week. They relate to the performance of and expenditure in public libraries for the year ending March 2008.
Over the next couple of weeks this site will publish more entries showing leading councils and poorest councils and other interesting information which can be derived from the figures, but for the moment I shall concentrate on a few headlines.
The first is that no one in the Government, or its agencies, seems to read, understand, digest and act upon the information.. It is as if the performance of an institution which employs 25,768 full time people and a further 15,008 volunteers, which costs the taxpayer £1,164,341,689 in a full year and which occupies, mostly free of charge, 4,540 national buildings, does not merit scrutiny or serious management analysis of any kind at a national level, or indeed any explanation or account to the public of what it does. There is no published document, no parliamentary report, no account from a quango, and no management review. The press releases from both CIPFA and the MLA that accompanied the data were misleading, and trivial and appeared to show no understanding of the issues at all nor interest in them.
Indeed the figures themselves came out 11 months after the event, which, in the days when data can be posted on prepared internet sites is ridiculous. They are, as always, in a format which would be incomprehensible to anyone who has not studied them for years and they contain no comparison with previous years. They are not readily available to members of the public at all, unless they search an even more incomprehensible pamphlet in their local library. In spreadsheet form, which is the only practical way to read them, a member of the public has to pay several hundred pounds, for access.
The lack of public access to performance figures of public libraries was a point made in a recommendation of the Culture Select Committee of 2005, and improvement became an agreed action of both the DCMS and MLA. Neither of these bodies have taken the least step, it seems, to undertake such work. The so called 'new MLA' has, one gathers, decided unilaterally, to ignore the undertakings of the old MLA, without reference to or comment upon them in this matter at all. I say in this in the most constructive spirit, knowing that neither the new management of the MLA nor its board, nor the current officers of the DCMS were in their posts when responses to the Select Committee were made. These included various promises which were extracted with some difficulty. One feels it would be of value for the current MLA board to go back to those agreed responses and implement fully those which remain unaddressed. Indeed it would be even better if the board of the MLA were to ask the new executive to go back to the recommendations of the Select Committee and improve the response that was made at the time, which was unhelpful and of poor quality.
Having said all this, as a preamble, the figure in the report to which I want first to draw attention, because from the document it is the matter which stands out as the most serious, is the level of "Support Service Charges". These are the amounts of money which a library service is charged for its portion of the administrative cost of the council of which it forms part. If you like, it is their share of the cost of those substantial activities which are not directly services to the public, but which the council needs to undertake and are the basis of all its services (like tax collection, or council internal communication and IT, the expenses of council meetings etc). They are an overhead cost which the council needs to manage and make efficient as they must any cost, where they are making use of taxpayers money.
Within any council the officers of the 'public facing' services are given little choice but to bear a share of these costs. They are rarely detailed, but they are often enormous. Indeed, it is very often difficult to find who is responsible for challenging and reducing them. They fall into a black hole in council administration, wherein no one is allowed to look or upon the edge of which it is dangerous to stand.
Currently the dramatic increase in this cost is destroying public libraries. While there is much talk of lack of national leadership and direction - or a confusion of purpose, or the costs of internet use in comparison to book stock, all of these are trivial matters in comparison to the sharply rising overhead cost of operating public libraries from within individual local councils. National leadership in the culture sector, for libraries, would not affect this matter in the least way. It is a management of basic financial control of public expenditure in local government, and from such evidence as these figures provides, it is a serious and potentially crippling problem. Yet I scanned the Audit Commission reports on local government also published last week and could see no mention of it. The current figure is 11.8%, and I think any chief executive of councils or any other body of this kind, would want reduce it to below 5% - whuch would make a saving or a very useful addition to the book fund of about £75m across the country.
Between 2000 and 2008 the major changes in the percentage costs of the public library service were (gross cost excluding capital charges)
The cost of Library staff and management fell by -0.5% (from 55.2% to 54.7% of the gross, total, cost)
The cost of Books fell by -2.4% (from 10.3% to 7.9%)
The cost of Other 'materials' for loan (dvd's etc) - no change (3.5%)
The cost of providing internet access fell by - -0.1% (from 3.4% to 3.3%)
The cost of Other service and supplies fell by -1.4% (from 5.8% to 4.4%)
The cost of Property rose by +0.4% (from 11.0% to 11.4%)
And the Support Services Cost- (Council recharge) rose by +3.4% (8.4% to 11.8%)
Exrapolated across all local council activities this represents about £2bn annually of inefficient or insufficiently productive expenditure. And that is just the council overhead- it says nothing about the services themselves.
The councils which are making the greatest charge for 'support services' are (with the percentage of the cost of the library service this cost represents)
Camden 31.6%
Greenwich 20.8%
Westminster 29.8%
Trafford 22.5%
Gateshead 32.7%
NE Lincolnshire 27.2%
Plymouth 21.8%
Poole 21.0%
Southampthon 25.6%
Swindon 29.6%
Thurrock 27.1%
Cambridgeshire 22.2%
Lincolnshire 25.0%
Oxfordshire 25.2%
Suffolk 20.2%
Surrey 38.7%
Warwickshire 31.2%
Ceredegion 20.5%
Vale of Glamorgan 23.6%
Clackmannanshire 28.4%
and those where the percentage is least are
Lambeth 3.8%
Bolton 2.2%
Salford 1.2%
Tameside 2.8%
Knowsley 0.3%
Sheffield 4.0%
North Tyneside 1.8%
Birmingham 2.4%
Solihull 1.1%
Darlington 2.5%
Isle of Wight 0.4%
North Lincolnshire 2.1%
Buckinghamshire 0.1%
Hampshire 2.6%
Kent 3.5%
N Yorks 1.5%
Highland 1.7%
N Ayrshire 3.4%
Scottish Borders 3.3%
S Lanarkshire 2.2%
Shetland 2.8%
Urgent action on this point, during the summer and before the next budget round, requires work, not only in individual councils, but also within the DCLG and the Audit Commission as well as the DCMS and MLA.. They cannot undertake this without a thorough investigation of last week's figures from CIPFA. Someone with leadership responsibility for public libraries should table this action immediately, identfying those responsible for carrying out the work, and ensure that it is carried out. Perhaps it is the responsbility of a senior manager of the Gershon Intitiative for Efficiency in Government
Those who say that the CIPFA figures are insufficently accurate or useful are wrong. It is true that they have weaknesses and they are imperfect in some ways, but they do carry a wealth of inportant and valuable management information.
(With apologies for errors, ommissions and misunderstandings)
Posted by Perkins at March 7, 2009 10:37 AM
Comments
From the Guardian, Feb 18 2009: "So if we're going to stop our town centres turning into dead-zones, we're also going to have to both preserve and re-energise our public institutions. Already there's anecdotal evidence that the downturn is boosting local libraries, though you wonder about the effects of the recession on council spending, and the looming payback for the government's current largesse. For a flavour of the even grimmer future that may materialise, have a look at cuts-crazed Warwickshire, run by a Tory administration. With good reason, local headlines fret about a library "meltdown": a recent county council report recommended a 35% drop in the book-buying budget, along with closing smaller libraries and shifting their services to - you've guessed it - supermarkets."
Posted by: Andrea Springer at March 8, 2009 5:58 PM
All these figures are making my head spin. Can't we just mount the second Jarrow March on London and put the the DCMS and MLA to fire and sword?
Posted by: James Christie at March 11, 2009 1:23 PM