Cllr Paul Lorber has been so riled by my criticism of his proposals on libraries that he has sent out an email to all councillors accusing me of being misleading. I certainly don't want anyone to be misled, so lets go through the various proposals Paul has put forward.
1) In an interview on 2 February to the Wembley Observer, he proposed setting up six charitable trusts, one for each library proposed for closure. Each of them would get £100,000 from the Council, giving a total annual revenue cost of £600,000. Additional revenue would be made up from unspecified fund raising and rentals. There were no details around whether Brent staff would be working in these libraries or whether Brent would provide functions like building insurance, IT etc.
2) On 28 February, he presented what I think is quite a different proposal at Brent's budget meeting. This was costed at £408,000, and seemed to be to keep the existing libraries working in the same way as at present i.e. as part of Brent's library service at least until groups of community activists had worked up plans how to take each building over. No explanation was given as to how the community activists' plans would be examined, or what would happen if no one put a proposal forward.
3) The proposal he actually submitted for appraisal by the officer in the Libraries Transformation Department was different once again. It related solely to Barham Library, and was only vaguely defined. It suggested various dubious ways of raising money, was unclear whether he was taking over part or the whole of the Barham building (and indeed park), or how it would relate to the Trust.
He is annoyed with me because I have suggested that he never bothered to submit his first proposal, despite telling the press: "These proposals are fully costed and if the Labour Executive is serious in their promise to listen to local people they will accept these proposals and give local people a chance to save their much loved local Library.” I still think I was right that he didn't submit prposal 1, and that far from having a costing scheme, he has only the vaguest notiuon of what he wants. On his second option, it strikes me more as a bit of procrastination than a plan. As for his third, I agree with the officers that it is a complete no hoper.
The two other points that strike me are: that a man who presents three quite different schemes in a two month period spending hundreds of thousands of pounds of taxpayers' money is not a very serious person. He strikes me as being more in the position of grandstanding for political advantage. The other criticism I have is that he doesn't seem to have even begun to consider the most important issues in drawing up a strategy. For example:
How do we design the service to meet the needs of the various equality strands?
How do we ensure that we use the limited resources we have as wisely as possible to maximise use of the service?
What do we need to do in response to technological and social change?
How do we balance the sometimes conflicting needs of different user groups?
Altogether I think I am entirely justified in regarding the Liberal Democrat response on libraries as utterly inadequate.
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