The closing stages of the General Election campaign saw the annual CIPFA figures on public library usage published. As usual the headline figure was the number of libraries closed, but what I found more noteworthy was the huge decline in budgets, down by almost 30%. The number of paid staff has collapsed alongside this (from 24,000 to 15,300 since 2010). In most of the country this has been accompanied by a hefty cut in the number of library visits, which have fallen from 315 million in 2009/10 to 226 million last year, roughly a third.
This is where Brent bucks the trend. Brent libraries grew enormously following the decision to go with the Libraries Transformation Project in 2011. While there was a slight dip in visits from 2018 to 2019, the number of visits is roughly a million up on where it was when the Transformation Project started.
As Laura Swaffield of The Library Campaign, points outs the government appears to be making no effort to examine authorities like Brent where the usage has gone up. One would think the the way that Wembley Library has jumped from a mediocre Town Hall library to one of the top three libraries in the UK might be of interest to anyone who really cares about libraries.
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