The Good Library Blog

If things were as described, the argument would be hard to resist. But things have moved on. To reduce back-room and material costs, many library services have stripped processing down to the bare minimum and the rest are rapidly following suit.

Suppliers aren't being asked to process stock in hundreds of different ways; the growth of library consortia is simplifying the whole supply chain and ensuring that contracts focus on delivering the best service to the end user at the lowest overall cost. Small suppliers of specialist material that customers want, demand and use aren't being left out in the cold either.

There are certainly forces at work that diminish what libraries are able to deliver, but they aren't within the control of the profession.

Dear nameless former chief librarian. Let me have a look at the budget of any library service of your choosing and I'll point out what chief librarians are failing to deliver.

Year after year chief librarians have told us they have done everything they possibly could and nothing is their fault. And every year book issues go down and costs go up.

Come on- let's get to specifics. Name some councils. It is all public money.

Dear Perkins

You seem to have missed the point - that your latest complaint is high on opinion but outdated on fact.

As far as costs go, if you look a little closer into the reported costs of most library services, you will find that while some authorities have actually been restoring book funds, most budgets are grossly distorted by the addition of an ever-increasing share of overall council costs. These 'overheads' are not invited or controlled by library services.

Oh, and finally ... as a keen reader of MLA and CIPFA press releases I'm sure you'll recall that library usage has actually been enjoying something of a resurgence.

All in all, it's a rather more cheering picture than you thought.

Dear former chief librarian. As you perfectly know there is no CIPFA information for library services passed March 2008- so none of us is able to be timely. I know there have been a handful of press releases about increased usage, but no one would call those a comprehensive picture.
I suggest we adjourn this discussion until the new CIPFA figures come out- which I, like you, shall scrutinise intently- then we shall see just how many councils have actually been restoring their stock funds.
Up until now CIPFA data has not given much to cheer about as i'm sure you know.
One is always amused to read that council overheads are out of control as if that were no ones responsibility or under no one's control. The short answer is they should be-- and the public can't do anything about them if highly paid officers of councils don't. And that includes, especially, chief librarians.
We shall see how cheering the picture is when CIPFA is kind enough to let us have a look at it. Frankly I doubt they will tell of a much better service than they have in every years of the past ten years, when every annual report has been worse than the one before it. Apparently the chief librarians of that decade have never known what to do to make it look better-- or am I wrong to say that, too?

Dear Tim

I can't work out whether or not you really don't understand how council budget-setting and decision-making work. The system was designed by accountants and bureaucrats, is fantastically opaque and generates confusion and frustration.

I would be delighted to explain it to you off-line though, in the hope that you might perhaps begin to spare just a little of your energy to pulling money out of the overheads black hole and putting it back into visible services.

Just drop me an email if you're interested.

Dear nameless former chief librarian. You can keep suggesting that I don't know how council budgets work or you could look down the list of council projects I have done over the past 12 years in Westminster, Richmond, Hampshire, Portsmouth, Southampton, Oxfordshire, Swindon, Tower Hamlets and, of course, Hillingdon as well as several others. I have also worked as the MD of subsidiary companies to large private corporations where a similar question of allocation of central overhead costs quite often arises.
You are right in the sense that the apportionment of central overheads in councils can often be opaque and those who operate it are resistant to questioning. However questioned they must be. I have come across library authorities which are charged for the wrong buildings, for sports centres that are not part of the same department, for totally erroneous costs and for systems they do not use. Sometimes the senior officers of council argue that these costs have to be paid for somewhere- but that is not a proper argument for charging them to libraries. It leads to sloppy public accounting and is not acceptable. It hides inefficiencies in the senior levels of the council. No council accounting system should be opaque-- none.
Mostly, though, I have found chief librarians who are too frightened to challenge the figures they are handed down and who know they are opening a pandora's box which might cause them trouble. Finance officers don't like these questions. Unfortunately that method does not serve the public properly. Yes- sir (or madam) - ~I know exactly what I am talking about and I bear the scars to prove it.
I first raised this as a national problem (here on this blog) which is increasing dramatically last year when the CIPFA figures were published. At that time your colleagues and the MLA also told me I didn't know what I was talking about-- this is a problem inflicted on libraries about which they can do nothing, I was told. It's not true- look at the reports written about Swindon- now people realise this is a matter that has to be dealt with and if librarians have to raise the issue, they must. They may be one of the first to feel the effects- they must say so. In Swindon one quarter of the library budget was taken up by central overhead costs- and because everyone was too frightened to talk about it, nobody knew there was a problem. The solution offered to paying for the overhead was the closure of several libraries. It was only when the public found out and were able to ask the councillors about it, that anybody recognised the problem.

In another council where the total library budget was £6m, the central overhead was charged at £1m more than it should have been, by mistake. I won't say where that was, but it was embarassing for the accountants involved and their councillor was very cross. Without being challenged these are serious problems.

So, I hope you can now see, I have spent a great deal of my time and energy in pulling resources out of black holes and putting them back into visible services- as you suggest.
As I said in my first response, if you bring me some council budgets I shall show you exactly where there is a need for action.

Good to see that you have dipped your toe in the shark-infested custard of local government budgets. You've obviously seen some of the nonsense I mentioned and that many if not most chiefs challenge. Unfortunately, they're up against Chief Executives and accountants who are understandably keen to offload central overheads onto frontline services - except when those look like being clobbered for being too expensive, and the costs get shuffled about again.

Most of us who are Library users will never know what the CIPFA figures are because they hide them away from the public who pay for them. It is about time that they were published free online. Loughborough was always able to do it.

The point about central overheads that Local Authorities fail to recognise is that cutting frontline services only results in redistribution of the overheads across across a smaller number of Libraries - effectively increasing the proportion of overheads that each Library has to shoulder..