Across the country in the past 10 years, according to their own figures provided to CIPFA, councils have reduced the stock of books for lending by 17m - a fall of nearly 20%.

These councils have reduced their stocks by large amounts

Greenwich by 149,000
Islington by 116,000
Lewisham by 147,000
Southwark by 112,000
Wandsworth by 217,000
Barnet by 396,000 (almost half)
Bexley by 155,000
Brent by 283,000
Bromley by 243,000
Croydon by 189,000
Enfield by 111,000
Haringey by 185,000
Manchester by 122,000
Stockport by 105,000
Tameside by 162,000
Liverpool by 138,000
Sefton by 100,000
Wirral by 142,000
Gateshead by 171,000 (exactly half the stock)
North Tyneside by 134,000
Dudley by 220,000
Sandwell by 168,000
Solihull by 162,000
Walsall by 256,000
Bristol by 118,000
Nottingham by 227,000
Redcar by 146,000 (almost half the stock)
Southampton by 131,000
Buckinghamshire by 142,000
Cambridgeshire by 253,000
Cornwall by 192,000
Cumbria by 203,000
Devon by 281,000
Dorset by 126,000
East Sussex by 116,000
Essex by 499,000
Hampshire by 410,000
Hertfordshire by 272,000
Kent by 613,000
Lancashire by 375,000
Northamptonshire by 368,000
Somerset by 168,000
Staffordshire by 195,000
Suffolk by 171,000
Surrey by 590,000
Warwickshire by 104,000
West Sussex by 242,000
Cardiff by 106,000
Carmarthenshire by 253,000
Swansea by 183,000
Aberdeen by 173,000
Clackmannanshire by 127,000 (more than half)
Edinburgh by 144,000
Fife by 222,000
Perth by 174,000 (almost half)
Renfrewshire by 133,000
South Lanarkshire by 229,000
West Dunbartonshire by 171,000 (exactly half)
and by other amounts in 110 councils

Stock of books for lending has increased, according to these figures in just

Wesminster
Hillingdon
Bury
Sheffield
Blackpool
Brighton
Halton
Portsmouth
Slough
Telford
Warrington
Windsor
Derbyshire
Norfolk
Oxfordshire
Shropshire
Bridgend
Ceredigion
Torfaen
Aberdeenshire
East Lothian
Glasgow (by a third)
Midlothian
North Ayrshire
Borders
Stirling
Orkney
Shetland
Northern Ireland

A small community library holds 10- 20,000 books. We may not have lost so many buildings, but by goodness we have lost the equivalent of 1000 libraries worth of books.

The rise is small, but is to be contrasted with the 3% fall that we have witnessed year after year. The figures, which are very late being published, include the first few months of the recession in which various councils reported anecdotally that they were seeing an increase.

The provisional data shows that book lending increased in 125 of the 200 UK library authorities

Most of all this shows that books are not history and that decline in book lending is not inevitable or necessary. If public libraries provide what people want, then they are a wonderful service. This is good news at long last. Let's hope we can make the growth continue. Libraries are fashionable again.

The figures also appear to show a further dramatic rise in the cost of council overheads and also that library authorities continue to increase spending on computers and systems and decrease spending on books. All these things, in Perkins view, are wrong and need to be corrected.

If you would like Perkins' view of the service provided by your council as it appears from the data they publish, it can be obtained by making a donation to this blog of £60.

If you make that donation I will send back to you my summary of what the council has said in recent years and my own personal view of the performance and the issues it raises.

You will discover whether your council has exceptionally high overhead costs, how much of the funding is spent on books, whether book lending figures have gone up or down, and some sensible comparisons against other places.

The donations button is in the right hand tramline and if you give an email address and a contact, the information will be sent back to that address as soon as it can be done.

We waited, some with optimism.

The evidence base that they needed to create was of two kinds, as was pointed out to them at the time. The first is about current and past performance and costs, not of library authorities, but of indivdual libraries. The second is about the public and how and why they use public libraries and why they don't.

If they had done these, as they promised, they would then have had some useful material with which to engage local councils- as they also promised. It would help a local council to make an improvement plan if it was able to work with this kind of evidence and make useful comparisons and analysis. They could then identify what they needed to do and their priorities. It would have been a basis for a constructive relationship, which has been long sought.

That information and help in understanding it, would also have been a help to those councillors who hold libraries in their portfolio. The MLA promised they would do that, too, especially for new councillors who come to the porfolio unprepared.

They have done none of these things. Particularly they haven't reported either to their own board or to the public as they promised they would. It is such reporting that provides the internal pressure in organisations to stick to the path agreed. Not to report at all is very poor management.

Instead we have "Daisy Dooz - Make a Noise in a Library." And a whole set of handouts of public money on consultancy projects which had nothing to do with what they had promised they would achieve. One would like to see a list of their project expenditures. It will reveal enormous sums as will the expenditure on new staff-- having made great redundancies when they took over.

That is why they have failed on their own project. The aim was ok- but the delivery has been non-existent. There was a job to do, but they didn't do it. Shut them down. We have to change.

Sadly, we have to start again- and this time we need to do what we say we will, but quickly because the public have paid several times over already.

If you saw the BBC film "Inside Out West" on Monday evening you will have seen how the Hillingdon project is thriving. "This library had 300 visits each week, now it has 3,000" said Councillor Higgins, proudly, and rightly so. The project was initiated nearly 4 years ago and it has addressed successfully almost all the problems of public libraries around the country. And the people are very nice. Council and officers in Hillingdon and the staff in the libraries, have all done a wonderful job.

This is an example of the kind of work I do that the civil servants are trying to stop. I have no idea why. Instead of explaining themselves they pass sneaky messages like 7 year olds in the classroom. It has happened many times and been going on for years. I have often known it was happening, but only seen written down once this time last year when Roy Clare and his senior officers at the MLA were caught like naughty school boys and had to admit it and say sorry. That was shocking to see and I don't understand why they are still in their posts. Honourable people would have resigned.

By now we should have done 10 Hillingdon projects and the library service in councils around the country would be thriving and everybody would be wanting to give libraries funds, as Hillingdon council find themselves doing, instead of taking them away. They know how important they are to local communities, you only have to go in any day and see: there is no need for a Social Think Tank to report.

But instead of that we find highly paid officials 'briefing' councils not to get involved, and not to go on the same path on which Councillor Higgins dances his merry jig.

These people should be ashamed of themselves. There should be no place for them in our civil service. They should all be in jail. They aren't interested in public libraries, but only in their own careers. They are contemptible and if they want to brief against me in secret, like the senior MLA executives did last year in Swindon, then they deserve each others' company and nothing else. That will be horrible enough.

"Charitable Trusts

The concept of library services operating within charitable trusts has been tried and tested, but an individual library service lacks the business characteristics needed to make a viable trust. Pulling several together, ideally with some related cultural business, would solve that problem.

Charitable trusts can collect and apply for funding from a huge range of sources closed to local authorities. They are free to decide which if any services they 'buy' from their parent councils. They are able to claim huge discounts on rates that councils have to pay on library buildings; simply moving libraries into a charitable trust can free up huge sums to be redirected into service delivery.

Typically, a trust will be managed by a board including both representatives of the funding organisation (the council) and the local community. It will have a multi-year funding agreement, linking payment to clear performance targets.

Shared services

The concept of shared services, in which two or more councils cooperate in the delivery of services, isn't new either although most elected members can't bring themselves to surrender sovereignty.

The shared service model brings economies of scale, particularly in management and in backroom functions, and allows neighbouring authorities to deliver services efficiently across a wider area rather than worrying about who owns and who provides what. Applying this to libraries allows staff, bookstock, mobile libraries, reference services erc., to be pooled.

Putting both models together seems to me to be not only the best way forward but probably the only way for libraries to weather the coming financial chill. There is no new money on the horizon and it is unrealistic to expect libraries to get priority when there isn't enough money to maintain adequate services for vulnerable children and adults.

And on Television on the BBC West programme "Inside Out"

There is a "donation" button in the right hand tramline, please do use it, and for adverts, the best way is to contact Karen at Berkshire Publishing. Rates are remarkably low and negotiable. The site is receiving over 4,000 hits a day at present and we have been told it has the highest level of readership of public library blogs in the UK.

These are the questions the DCMS review and the MLA should have been dealing with instead of occupying themselves with the nonsense about digital books and other projects. Rather than wallowing in their own interdepartmental PR campaigns they should have concentrated on where these cuts would come and shown councils how to reduce overhead instead of service.

Where is the Society of Chief Librarians while all this goes on? Entertaining themselves in Edinburgh Castle at our expense. Shame on all of them.

Inside Out West : Monday, 1st March, 19.30 BBC One (West only)

Those unable to view the programme on Monday should be able to access a pod-cast after it is broadcast.

The programme features a number of library authorities in the West country and also the London Borough of Hillingdon

""Hoiking" library services "out of local authority control and into regional or sub-regional trusts able to deliver economies of scale" will do nothing to resolve the problem but merely make management even more remote from the users than is already the case. The cause of the decline in library use is firmly rooted in the failing of senior management, cabinet members and central government, making our libraries even more remote via some form or regional management will exacerbate the problem. While it might be necessary for library authorities to co-operate in the provision of things such as providing a single catalogue, and the purchase of electronic information resources services this is quite feasible without centralising the whole structure. Even this limited centralisation needs to be treated with caution, as large book purchasing consortiums are prone to ignore the importance of local bookshops and small publishers, which form a part of the popular literary culture that sustains libraries. "

These observations are so true and describe how the London LIbraries Change Programme is proposing that just such an amalgamation will bring improvement, where there is no real reason at all why it should

Ministers depend on Departments. In the avoidance of making decisions to benefit the public, Departments create quangoes. Quangoes seek Consultants to affirm their own existence; and Consultants seek the next appointments. Local Government defends its independence from national government more strongly than it works for its own residents. Nowhere in the cycle does man or woman claim a responsibility to the public and call for appropriate action.

If we were talking about improvement in Government this is what we ought to be facing - this is the real political issue. And it is hard because it has never been the central political issue, in our country, before. We do not have the language, the media or the method to deal with it.

The real 'Broken Society' lies not in the streets of our towns but in the boulevards of our capital cities.

The skills being taught today are often too theoretical and in many cases redundant, as good managers already in the workplace find better, cheaper, faster ways of getting things done. Syllabuses need to be brought up to date and made more responsive to changes in the workplace; existing professionals (not CILIP) should be hard-wired into this process.

The skills that are needed to run a large public service - customer care, change management, entrepreneurship, negotiation, strategic thinking - need to be there in latent form and developed through experience and mentoring by those with the experience. Employers and elected members also need to see those skills as desirable rather than a threat!

To get real benefit out of all this, we also need to hoik library services out of local authority control and into regional or sub-regional trusts able to deliver economies of scale and concentrate on delivering the best possible service for the lowest possible price without being used alternately as a political plaything and a budget patch.

On the subject of fawning, I know only a handful of professional libarians who have been able to sustain that approach. The majority of chief librarians have never held back from swift, direct and very frank exchanges with DCMS and MLA both individually and through SCL, a small voluntary body that should not be confused with the unloved, unfocussed and near-extinct CILIP.

Are they Mad? Why don't we also have a campaign to "Poke someone in the eye in a library and make it hurt". How much are we paying for this one?

It's not that one objects to events in libraries, especially those intended to widen the audience, but firstly, there is so much to be done that is basic and fundamental, that it is hard to understand why anyone would make this a priority for money and effort and secondly the tone of voice of the slogan is so patronising and irritating that one wonders who has given it the time of day.

In plain English it says "We despise people who have a serious use for libraries. Get out of our way." Why do you have to say that? It is aggressive and embarrassing