Stagnating Economy

Ending the year with Robert Skidelsky's assessment of where economic policy went wrong.  I think he overestimates the universality of the error.  A lot of people saw the likely effect of austerity but George Osborne persisted anyway.  Less obvious was the limited effect of quantitative easing which has failed to stimulate the economy or lead to higher inflation.

Clues Criticised

This week's Willesden and Brent Times carries a letter criticising David Clues for suggesting that the Anglican Church "transferred" him to Brighton as if he had no choice in the matter.  The letter suggests, I believe correctly, that Anglican ministers normally apply for jobs.  They don't simply get put in another diocese.

As he sips a pre-prandial sherry, perhaps the Rev. Clues might reflect that staying on as a Brent councillor having moved to Brighton really just isn't worth it, and it would be better for his own reputation if he just stood down.

Tubbs Road Pocket Park Water Supply

I understand that Tubbs Road pocket park has finally had a water supply connected.  It is quite extraordinary how long you have to persist with these things before something happens.

Bookshops and Libraries

A BBC report suggests that bookshops are used by many customers for window shopping before they go home to buy the same books online for much lower prices. If so, this would be very sad.  However, it does make me wonder about the future role of libraries.

I know of some American evidence that libraries in the USA perform a similar function.  Users that a first look at a book in a library, and subsequently purchase it from a retailer.  I am not aware of any UK research on this, but it is a key argument in suggesting that the book industry should see libraries as allies in building demand for books rather than as enemies seeking to cannibalise their sales.  Libraries have Ben particularly attacked for this in terms of ebook sales.

If one were to accept such a view of the role of libraries, it would be confirmation of the rightness of Brent in maintaining its book stock (and substantively increasing it in Kilburn Library).  It might also help inform the design of libraries.

Walking and Planning

The Guardian has piece on walking today.  This is a much neglected area of urban planning. One of the key intentions of the Harlesden Town Centre development is to make the Centre friendlier to pedestrians.

It's animating principle is the "road user hierarchy" which tries to arbitrate between the many groups that use a universal service like a street.  The hierarchy puts pedestrians first and motorists at the bottom.  This is obviously quite a stark choice, but then decisions about a finite universal resource frequently are.

The consequences of ignoring pedestrians in street design can be seen in places like South Kilburn, where the big tower blocks put up in the 1960s completely fail to create a sense of place.  An artist told me that she reacted very well to them as sculptural forms, which is no doubt what the designers intended, but they simply do not work as places to live.  Because, the streets are inherently unwelcoming, people simply use them for transit from A to B.  This means that they effectively disintegrate the community, which has no natural points of interaction_ feeding into all kinds of social degeneration.

A separate issue is the relationship between motor traffic and pedestrians. Currently, many of our urban areas are designed around cars, and the intention of developments like Harlesden is to shift the emphasis back towards people.  Sometimes indeed, measures like guardrails that are intended to safeguard people, actually endanger them.  The worst example I know of are the rails on Station Approach by Willesden Junction station, which force people to walk into the road.  Hopefully, these will be gone by June.

We have a policy now to try to ensure these kind of quality of life issues are taken into account, but it becomes more and more difficult as the resources available to the Council diminish.

Mixing Traditions

Modern Christmas appears to be becoming ever more of a mélange of different cultural traditions.  According to the Economist, American Jews are adopting Christmas In there own ways.  Muslim families have long eaten turkey at Christmas, and I have noticed that the British Christmas appears to be becoming ever more Americanised.  Well before the day this year, I saw cranberry sauce on sale everywhere.  For much longer "Santa Claus" has been easing out the English "Father Christmas".  I suppose this has been going on for centuries, not least with the many different roles Christmas trees have played down the years.

The Alternative to Hollowing Out Libraries

I see that Derbyshire County Council have made the opposite choice to Brent in deciding to "hollow out" their services as an alternative to closure.  This will be much easier for them politically, but lead to a long term decline, as I have argued before.

For a while they can get along with cutting opening hours and book stock, as they are currently doing. They can also reduce wider services, for example lower grade computers, fewer electronic materials and higher charges for discretionary things like ebook lending.  They can also increase fines for late books, and safeguard their revenue by making those books harder to renew (for example, by not allowing online or telephone renewals).  All these are short term measures that can keep them going for a bit, but they all erode the quality of the library experience for the user.  They also create a new baseline of lower expectation.  In the pattern of savage cuts to Council funding, it will be difficult for any future administration in Derbyshire to restore book buying to the previous level; lower book stock will simply become the new norm.  Indeed I believe Gloucestershire had already cut back it's book buying dramatically. I suspect that they then decided to start closing branches because they could no longer obtain savings from the book budget.  In other words, this pattern of across the board cuts in services may well simply delay branch closures rather than prevent them.

At the same time, the technological changes that the book industry and society are going through are as dramatic as the rise of printing itself.  If libraries don't engage with the ongoing spread of digital information in every walk of life, they will simply become irrelevant. Libraries without up to date technology will not be able to help people into the job market or to help people with educational requirements because they simply won't have the technology that education and increasing numbers of companies need.

All this brings me back to the Brent answer to these problems.  Instead of salami slicing across the service we are concentrating our increasingly limited resources on a smaller number of buildings.  Each of these buildings will be in a transport node, preferably co-located with other services, and with an excellent range of library services available for as many hours as possible.  We will also use an outreach service and other means to try to draw in as many users as possible to make maximum use of library resources, and (incidentally) maintain public support for the service.

UPDATE

Comments below seem to be on a different subject to the post.  I was interested that Derbyshire, and earlier Southampton, both framed the problem in the same way as me independently.  The real choice facing authorities bearing the brunt of Eric Pickles brutal attack on local government is should their library services absorb the pressure through cuts in staff and services (as Derbyshire and Southampton have chosen to do), or by prioritising services at the expense of buildings?

Welfare Change Delays

On the eve of Christmas, we learn of delays and disfunction in the Colition government's welfare changes.  Aside from the sheer brutality of the changes, the speed with which the government is trying to push them through is likely to lead to bureaucratic chaos. By the way, I notice that Ms Teather is continuing her u-turn on the issue. I suspect that had Mr Cameron chosen to keep her in a ministerial job she would now be quite happy to stay silent as her constituents suffered.

Father Christmas Under Modern Management

Flip Chart Fairy Tales imagines Father Christmas using modern management techniques here.  Unfortunately, Father Christmas still seems to use off fashioned face to face when he should be seeking channel shift to more cost effective online mechanisms.

Shopping

The last couple of days have seen queues of extraordinary length outside John Line the butchers in Harrow Road.  It sets me thinking about how to promote the health of shopping areas, which are being doubly hit by the rise of Internet shopping and the ongoing recession.

I don't think that there can just be one solution.  Looking at Harlesden Town Centre we do have a major advantage in the range of our food shops and we should seek to capitalise on that.   Brent Council is also promoting a number of other measures, such as the use of meanwhile space and encouraging networking among businesses, but there is no doubt that the government's austerity and  technological change give major headwinds.

More Council Budget Cuts on the Way

Eric Pickles announcement of local government funding looks as if the funding of Brent will continue to fall.  It is difficult to be clear at this stage, as the government deliberately makes the announcement in a way to make the details as obscure as possible, But it looks as if a fall in 2013 will be followed by a much bigger fall in 2014.  This will also be true for lots of other Councils in poor areas, although much less so for Councils in richer areas.

There is no doubt that this is driving some Councils towards collapse, and that before long they will be unable to carry out their statutory as well as non-statutory services.

Another Coalition Power Grab

Our mendacious government continues to pretend to be devolving decision making whilst doing the opposite.  The latest proposal, now out to consultation, is to allow the Secretary of State to designate certain planning authorities as too slow to make decisions and then take over their planning powers for major applications (more than about 10 properties).

I suspect the main effect of this power grab would be that the SoS wold find that he was being asked to decide far more cases than he had staff to deal with, and decisions would have much longer delays and probably worse quality decisions.

Ebook Lending in Brent

Our ever entrepreneurial library staff are using Christmas to advertise our ebook lending service.  Only about a third of English library services lend ebooks, and some of them charge for loans.  Brent's service is free.

Andy Gale and Government Mendacity

An extraordinary tale of government mendacity is told by Patrick Butler here.  There is surely something desperate in the DCLG trying to deny its links to an adviser as soon as he is quoted explaining the obvious effects of the government's housing policy.

Murad Qureshi on Air Quality

I am not sure the photo op was well advised, but Murad Qureshi raises a serious point about air quality.  It is greatly to Murad's credit that he has persisted on the air quality issue for such a long time.

Town Centre Problems

Out door knocking on Sunday, I came across a number of issues around crime, anti-social behaviour, prostitution and noise pollution.  Some of these are already under investigation, but the nature df these things tends to be intractable.  Just as I did with Willesden Junction's Station Approach, I Intend to pursue these, but it will take time.

Kilburn Library Resident Artist

I am just back from a talk given by Anya Beaumont on her experience as a resident artist in Kilburn Library.  I got a real sense that, if money can be found, resident artists could add an enormous amount of value to our libraries. Anya spent a lot of time in the library itself, but also went out to the Granville Centre and St Mungos in Chichester Road.

Futures for Local Government

I still get the impression that many people just don't get the extent to which the current government's cuts aren't just temporary.  Although it had no mandate for such a change at the General Election, the coalition really is trying to enforce a complete transformation, possibly without understanding what it is trying to transform us all into.  The Guardian has some interesting speculation about possible futures here.

Comments

Just approved a couple of comments to this blog.  My policy is to approve unless there is a positive reason not to e.g. Libel, offensiveness etc.

However, I am often struck by the certainty of the comments and their anonymity.  They often make factual statements without evidence (for example, the idea that I or other members did not challenge the WLWA accounts, which is flatly untrue).  They are also remarkable in that the people making them fail to identify themselves. The comments I post here are clearly attributable to me. Why don't other people choose to stand up for what they say they believe in?

Social Networking and it's Annoyances

I recall many years ago I set up a Facebook account in order to access a particular site. My usage (such as it was) ceased with that site. Nonetheless, I continue to get a stream of marketing rubbish from Facebook to this day.  I am sure that the same would be true of twitter and so on.

With phone numbers, which also used to be plagued in this way, one could sign up for tpsonline.com.  This stands for telephone preference service and allows the user to block out much of this annoyance. Indeed, even the companies themselves appear to have worked out that the calls are counterproductive and given up. How much longer before Facebook wakes up to the same message?