Stand up to save the libraries

Published: 24 February, 2011

• WHILE we acknowledge that the council has been placed between a rock and a hard place in having to carry out the government’s vicious spending cuts, nevertheless, if they are unable to stand up to them then they must be prepared to go down with them.  

In this context I’d like to draw their attention to an authoritative report, carried out a few years ago, by Libri, a charity set up specifically to investigate library funding. 

This came to the unequivocal conclusion that, with proper reorganisation in the back office, the service provided by the libraries could not only be maintained but actually improved. It’s not, in fact, a problem of cuts so much as a problem of funding. 

Their report in Hampshire, for example, showed that they could have saved £5million out of their budget of £20million through reorganisation. 

This year in Somerset the annual cost of the library service is £3.5million while the cost of the back office is £4million and the council officers were seeking to impose all of the cuts on the service and none on the back office. 

In that the officers on the council (every council) have a vested interest in maintaining their jobs, they are, perhaps, not the best people to be allocating the cuts in the first place. 

It’s a bit like asking turkeys to vote for Christmas. With cuts in the back office, libraries can be saved, and even improved. This is just an example, in my opinion, of the deeper malaise in local government with regard to the delivery of local services.

ROGER LLOYD PACK