Public Library System

Lord Stevenson of Balmacara Excerpts

Tuesday 29th October 2013 Grand Committee

Asked by

[Lord Stevenson of Balmacara]

To ask Her Majesty’s Government what is their assessment of the contribution being made by voluntary staff to a sustainable public library system in the United Kingdom.

[Lord Stevenson of Balmacara (Lab)]

My Lords, I thank those who have put their names down to speak in this debate today. We are a small band, but we are experts in these matters and I am sure that the debate will be of very high quality.

I will first look at how public libraries are run in the United Kingdom; then ask whether we have got the right system; express concern about the level of closures in recent years; and ask for the Minister’s views on the viability and long-term future of community libraries in the light of the recent Women’s Institute report, On Permanent Loan?

I have some key facts. There are 3,243 libraries in England and 4,265 in the UK as a whole. Authorities in England spend £820 million on their library services. There were 256 million visits to libraries in England and 244 million book loans in England last year. However, these figures mask the fact that this is a service in crisis. This is a service, together with others, which is delivering against a backdrop of significant public sector financial difficulty. It seems to many people that we are failing to deliver a “comprehensive and efficient” service to a population which, despite other competing attractions, retains an appetite for reading.

The Public Libraries and Museums Act 1964 places a statutory duty on library authorities to provide a “comprehensive and efficient” library service. Despite the fact that the Libraries Minister is in DCMS, the libraries’ authorities are in fact the local authorities. As the Minister, Mr Ed Vaizey, said in his speech last September:

“As I often point out, libraries are emphatically a local authority service, and are fully funded by local government and run by local government”.

What role, then, does DCMS play in this? Clearly, nothing direct. Mr Vaizey goes on:

“Nevertheless, they can benefit from having a national development agency to push innovation and best practice. And our decision to give responsibility for libraries to the Arts Council (ACE) will provide exactly that service”.

Although DCMS therefore has statutory responsibility for there being a national library service, the operational responsibility lies in another department—as does responsibility for many of the users, children in particular.

This is all quite mad, but all is not lost. The Minister goes on to defend the decision to give such responsibility as his department has for public libraries to an arm’s-length body responsible for the arts, though he rather spoils his case by announcing that,

“the Arts Council will be allocating £6 million from its Grants for the Arts programme over the next two years for library authorities to lead projects working with artists, arts organisations and other cultural organisations on arts and cultural activity through libraries … This fund will aim to stimulate ambitious, innovative partnerships between libraries and artists and arts organisations. It will help raise the ambition and expectation of libraries, and represents a significant commitment by the Arts Council to their new role”.

Well, it is certainly a significant commitment, but I am sure that noble Lords will be left wondering how this helps the basic work of public libraries.

Mr Vaizey also announced that CIPFA will be commissioned by DCMS to provide reports on all library authorities in England. I would be interested in hearing from the Minister whether these reports are helping the situation and what they constitute. Mr Vaizey says:

“My Department will use the reports to look for ways in which we can help local authorities. I must emphasise that this is not an attempt to sanction local authorities and certainly not a return to top-down, inflexible library standards. But if we see wildly diverging opening hours between two similar authorities with similar budgets and infrastructure, there will be an opportunity to ask questions and look at how opening hours could be improved … Or if one authority is spending twice as much on book stock as another, but providing a similar number of books, we can ask if there are ways to improve efficiency in the authority in question”.

This is all very silly. So that is how it is done. I look forward to the Minister’s comment. Can he give us a concrete example of any action that has flowed from this new approach? More generally, can he say in what way the library service in the country has been improved under these arrangements?

Of course the situation on the ground is rather different. In his speech, the Minister dealt with library closures:

“A figure of 600 library closures is regularly quoted in the media—but it is very wide of the mark. A truer picture of building closures would be about a tenth of that”.

My calculations make that 60. However, I read today on the website “Voices for the Library” that,

“201 library service points were closed last year … A further 336 are threatened with closure … Arts Council England predicts a further cut of at least 40% by 2016”.

That sounds a lot more like 600 than 60. The Library Campaign is the national group for library users, which says:

“Library users have appealed time and again to the minister to intervene against mass closures. He has a legal duty to ‘superintend and improve’ the service. But he does nothing”.

Turning to the subject of the debate today, community libraries, we can all agree that libraries offer a lifeline to many people in need, especially to those with no internet access, families with small children, those in education and older people. It has been put rather better than I could have done:

“Libraries are the last refuge of a civilised society”.

According to the Library Campaign, many communities are now trying to run their own libraries as the only way they have of saving them. CILIP—the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals—published a survey in March which found that 13% of councils had set up community-managed libraries, and that 38 libraries became or planned to become community managed in 2011-12. The way in which libraries are managed varied from area to area. For example, in Doncaster, volunteers run Warmsworth library but can telephone a staffed branch if they need advice. However, handing over libraries to volunteers continues to divide opinion.

I am sure that the Minister is aware of the Women’s Institute campaign, Love Your Libraries, which was started after a resolution on the closure of local libraries and received overwhelming support from delegates at the 2011 AGM. Much of what I want to say in the remainder of this speech is taken from its excellent report, On Permanent Loan?. I am very grateful to the then chair Ruth Bond and campaign officer Mary Roberts for their advice.

The report starts by talking about the value of libraries to WI members. Some WI groups have grown up directly from links with local libraries and many depend on libraries to run their book groups or form other links with local libraries. Members with young children value the free and low-cost activities provided by libraries. Those who are older have found the library an important enabler for lifelong learning, et cetera. There is a great deal of involvement of the Women’s Institute with the library service.

The NFWI conducted research with WI members on what made their libraries so important to them, which is included in the report. I will not go into it in detail but it is very useful and very interesting reading. The research found that women in households with children are more likely to access library services than men or households without children, which means that there is also a bigger effect when libraries are closed. That is obviously an important equality point. It points out that libraries are a key service at a time when 20% of households do not have an internet connection. We heard about that in the House this afternoon during Question Time.

The research also reports that there is a strong case for libraries because increasingly children do not own books. A recent survey shows that every third child now does not own a book. That is the 2011 figure, up from one child in 10 in 2005. There is obviously a real concern about the use of library books by young people. The research found that the impact of budget reductions on a local level is such that the future of the public library service is at risk through the gradual erosion of the service. There is insufficient scrutiny of the broad impact of such changes on the network as a whole and the result may be a postcode lottery, with significant variations in service quality across different local areas.

The research also found that the proliferation of community-managed libraries is in danger of creating a two-tier network of library services. Professional staff must be at the heart of a 21st century library service and, while volunteers have an important role to play in public libraries, many communities do not have the capacity or appetite to run services themselves. The report looked at the experience of volunteers from the WI who worked in libraries and community libraries. It found that the piecemeal development of community-managed libraries and inadequate guidance of good practice have resulted in many volunteers receiving a chronic lack of support from local authorities and facing a range of unrealistic demands. Volunteers were navigating a complex obstacle course of responsibilities and often struggling to discharge these responsibilities effectively, raising questions about the long-term sustainability of community-managed libraries. These are serious concerns and I would be grateful if the Minister could comment on them as much as he is able to.

As the report says:

“Public libraries are a huge asset to any community, and the fact that numerous communities have gone to great lengths to prevent library services from closing down demonstrates this”.

However, only certain communities will have the resources to set up and run a library and therefore there must be a concern that the proliferation of these models could effectively lead to a postcode lottery, as I mentioned earlier.

Finally, these issues were raised in the recent DCMS Select Committee report. The committee worried how DCMS could retain,

“an element of national oversight”—

a point I made at the start of my remarks—and points out that:

“The current situation, however, where the Secretary of State has considerable reserve powers but is unwilling at present to use them, satisfies no one”.

I gather that the powers were last used in 2009. Perhaps the Minister could comment on that when he responds.

Secondly, the committee says that there needs to be a rethink of the Secretary of State’s supervisory duties, with more emphasis on,

“developing the service, promoting best practice and supporting the service through intervention at a national level in areas where there are potential efficiencies of scale”.

It points out that,

“adopting this approach would not require amendments to legislation as the Secretary of State already has the duty of promoting the improvement of library services”.

Can the Minister comment on that as a proposal?

Finally, commenting on the growth of community libraries, the committee suggests that,

“local authorities need to give careful consideration to how to do least damage to the service provided to the public now and for the future. They must ensure that they retain enough experienced and/or professionally qualified staff to develop the services … and to support the growing number of volunteers both within their core library service and in any community libraries that may be established locally”.

The committee also said:

“Councils which have transferred the running of libraries to community volunteers must above all, however, continue to give them the necessary support, otherwise they may wither on the vine and therefore be viewed as closures by stealth”.

Does the Minister agree with this conclusion, and if so, what does he intend to do about it?

The report also records that the Secretary of State has committed to produce a report by the end of 2014 on the cumulative effect on library services of the reduction in local authority provision and the growth of alternatives such as community libraries. Can the Minister confirm that this will happen, and if so whether it would be possible to have an annual debate on that report in Parliament?