This report on the financing of Suffolk libraries caught my eye recently. Suffolk went for a bold new model of minimalist local government, which quickly went down in flames. Arising from this, they also spun off their library service to an industrial and provident society. As far as I know, they are the only authority to have gone down precisely this route.
The link shows some of the strange smoke and mirrors of the funding, which makes it quite hard to work out whether Suffolk is actually saving money. If the IPS is exempt from business rates, which is generally one of the main selling points of these trust type arrangements, the County Council probably makes no overall saving from the arrangement as it whatever it saved from not paying from the library budget it no longer collects though its revenue side. That seems to leave the main potential saving as raising donations from local communities, but that sounds either artificial (coming from the Suffolk equivalent of Ward Working) or much lower than expected.
The trouble for Suffolk is that they seem to have acknowledged the IPS is delivering their statutory duty to provide libraries so they are now tied to a body they no longer fully control, and whose finances seem shaky. Altogether, one can see why the model has not been taken up elsewhere.
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