Comprehensive and Efficient Library Services

Lincolnshire library services are now being cut back in a way that I have suspected that many authorities would sooner or later come round to.  It is a harbinger of the situation predicted by the Local Government Association, where authorities simply have no money to perform their most basic functions, and sometimes not even then.

For libraries, this means cutting back to the bare minimum even when they are delivering a statutory service.  This is a point often lost in discussions on statutory services _ that you can deliver them in different ways including minimalist ones.  As local authority budgets dwindle, there is a logic to authorities defining their statutory duties in the narrowest possible terms.  However, Lincolnshireshire appears to have gone further than anyone else:

This is the first  authority I can recall whose cuts have been so clearly tailored to reach the minimum statutory provision. Public Libraries News

A Curious Duty
In terms of the 1964 duty to provide a "comprehensive and efficient" service, this could lead to restrictions that will distress many people.  The duty has some curious features.

Firstly, it does not apply to buildings at all.  There is no duty to provide library buildings, merely services.  Hence there is no legally enforceable standard for how many buildings you have.  In principle, an authority could provide a service without any buildings at all, although I don't see how that would work in practice.

Secondly, the SoS takes the view _ expressed clearly in all the (non) intervention decisions _ that computers are not part of the library duty.  This is so absurd in terms of how people understand modern libraries that many people find it hard to accept.  Logically, it would mean that PCs, WiFi access and even ebooks have no place in any legal library duty, which would mean a Council would have no duty to provide them.  I have suggested before that if this interpretation is allowed to stand, there will effectively be no library duty at all.  However, I think that in the Brent case, Mr Ouseley J implied that there could be a duty to have electronic devices implied in the Act.  The best way to resolve this would be new legislation which would mean that we were no longer working with laws drawn up before the invention of the microchip.

An Even More Curious Argument
It is also interesting that Lincolnshire are interpreting the law with an emphasis on a duty to provide an efficient service.  That comes out strongly in paragraph 2.49 of the Lincolnshire report where they say they have"no choice".  In other words they are using it to argue that they have an actual duty to close down their less efficient branches to come into line with the 1964 Act.  That sounds to me like a rather desperate excuse to close down libraries that you want to close down anyway.

The Brent Approach

In Brent, we have chosen a very different route, of trying to maximise the quality of our library service.  This has been a difficult argument to get across, as it seems counter intuitive to many people, but as we move into a more positive phase _ with more library users of six libraries than we had with twelve, I hope people will begin to see that the blanket condemnation was not the right response to what is actually a positive and well thought out strategy to bring our library service into the present century.