Meeting documents

Cllr John Bull

Statement to Cabinet 6 February 2008

Agenda Item 13 Financial Plan 2008/09 - 2010/11, Budget and Council Tax 2008/09

Libraries

I would like to appeal to the Cabinet to reconsider the planned reduction of £75,000 in the Library Service budget to be achieved either by reducing the book fund, converting some libraries to `community' management and staffing.

These proposals were put to the Safer and Stronger Communities Overview and Scrutiny Panel and the Enterprise and Economic Development Overview and Scrutiny Panel, both of whom expressed concern over them.

The two main options proposed are to reduce the Book Fund or to turn over some Libraries to community status. As the O&S Panel Report points out reducing the Book Fund would put B&NES in the lowest 25% of authorities as far as this expenditure is concerned. More relevantly, it would mean the book stock would become dated more quickly, fewer new books would be purchased and the libraries would become even less attractive. This is in a context in which library visits have already declined in B&NES - by 13% in the period 1995-2005.

The Labour Group wishes to see libraries protected. We are opposed to the proposed saving of £75k in libraries which can only be achieved through redundancies and a decline in the book stock.

B&NES currently spends £1.16 per head on library material. The average for unitary authorities is £1.78. The Council purchases 104 items per 1,000 of the population. The National Public Library Standard is 216 items. An independent review has already recently described our book stock as "weak", with a failure to stock key titles, and those titles that we do hold being borrowed so often that they are tired and shabby. These cuts would leave Bath and North East Somerset in the bottom 25% of councils for book purchases.

The second more radical proposal is to make certain libraries wholly or partly dependent on volunteer staffing and management. No libraries are mentioned by name but smaller ones, such as Paulton and Saltford are the obvious candidates. The scheme may sound attractive in theory, but in practice would be the first step on a slippery slope of decline. It presumes in its fully fledged form, that volunteers can be found to manage the library locally; assuming these can be found they would have to be supported by all the bureaucratic paraphernalia of Service Level agreements, monitoring by the Library Service, performance criteria etc. How much money would this actually save?

Even a partial scheme would be dependent on recruiting volunteers to staff the Library to cover reasonable opening hours. But imagine the situation where a volunteer fails to arrive because of sickness, child care commitments or other legitimate reasons - or maybe has something more attractive to do that day. The library would not open or would close early; there would be disappointed users who would lose confidence that the library was going to be open when they expected it to be - and again the result would be falling numbers of users and ultimately perhaps an excuse for permanent closure.

All of this affects our CPA score which rates culture mainly according to library performance.

The Labour Group would like to propose that the Cabinet reviews the capital programme to identify any slippages at the year end. These slippages could be used to fund the Library Service capital programme thereby saving the Service £55k per annum in borrowing and lease costs. This would help to reduce the pressure to reduce staff numbers and book stock. The Labour Group would further propose that the Cabinet looks to find the £20k from elsewhere, without making further cuts to other frontline services.