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November 30, 2010
It's the overhead costs that have ruined the library service
For a long time people said that the cost of introducing computers into libraries reduced the book fund to the point that the libraries had insufficient books to be useful.
This was never true. It was always the increasing cost of management and overhead, both within the library service operation and in the council itself, that has caused the fall in the book fund. Councils, generally up to now, have funded library services generously, but at the same time they have not challenged and kept control of the costs in the way that they should.
Cipfa and councils do not distinguish the overhead within the library operation as they ought to, for councillors to see, but they do show the 'recharge' which is made on libraries by council central departments like HR and Systems.
If there is one single factor that has deprived the public of the library service they want (apart from the general fiddling about of its management), it has been the failure to mount an effective campaign to reduce overhead or 'back office' costs. Productivity has halved, instead of increased. The responsibility for this really lies at Director level within councils, but one can't help feeling that if only the 'profession' and bodies like the MLA and SCL had grasped the question properly, instead of avoiding it, then those same directors would have been better able to keep control. I recall the MLA and SCL agreeing that they would do that in 2006, but as ever, they didn't really begin to understand it, never mind know how to tackle it!
The central council recharge across UK library services has risen from about £60m pa ten years ago to £130m last year. Here is the figure, expressed as a % of the gross operating cost of the library service.
UK public libraries Central Council recharge as a % of gross library operating cost
1999/00 8.1%
2000/01 8.4%
2001/02 9.5%
2002/03 10.1%
2003/04 10.3%
2004/05 10.4%
2005/06 11.3%
2006/07 11.9%
2007/08 12.6%
2008/09 12.9%
There are several astonidhing things about these figures, not least how they rise. They are published every year but apart from trying to deny that they mean anything, absolutely no one anywhere actually does anything about them.
The worst councils, which charge astonishing levels of overhead are
Croydon 46.6%
Surrey 42.0%
Lincolnshire 40.2%
Newham 36.4%
Lambeth 34.7%
Camden 34.5%
At the same time the book fund has shrunk like this:
Book purchasing as % of gross operating cost
1999/00 10.2%
2000/01 10.3%
2001/02 9.5%
2002/03 9.2%
2003/04 9.1%
2004/05 8.7%
2005/06 8.3%
2006/07 8.0%
2007/08 8.0%
2008/09 7.2%
2009/10 7.2%
Many councils don't make clear how much they spend on books, but of those that do, the lowest spenders are the authorites of Inner London who between them spend only 4.9% of the library operating cost on books. In London the Recharge for overheads is 20% of the cost of the service, or £40m. That's why I say with confidence that it is possible to reduce the cost of public libraries in London by £50m without even being very clever.
Strange that I haven't noticed the London LIbraries Change Programme mention that... yet!
This is why, when speaking to the press, one says that it is management and overhead bureacracy that have destroyed public libraries, not a lack of desire on the part of the public to use them.
The obvious thing to do faced with a need to cut costs, is to tackle this problem first. The wrong thing to do is to shut small libraries- that just makes the service worse and saves very little.
Posted by Perkins at November 30, 2010 8:45 AM
Comments
Agree entirely.
Posted by: Peter Richardson at December 3, 2010 3:12 PM