Earl of Kinnoull
Main Page: Earl of Kinnoull (Crossbench - Excepted Hereditary)
The Earl of Kinnoull (CB)
My Lords, I, too, thank and congratulate the noble and energetic Lord, Lord Bird. I always admire his passion, and it would be remiss if we did not pay careful heed and attention to the warnings he has so clearly set out today.
I declare my interests as set out in the register of the House. In particular, I declare that I am chairman of Culture Perth and Kinross, the charitable trust that, inter alia, operates 13 library premises and four mobile libraries in Perth and Kinross. I thought it would be interesting to give the House a few facts and figures about how our regional library system is interacting with our local residents, as it indicates the extent and breadth of what a modern library systems does in its local area. I am sure it is pretty typical, and I hope that we make the bar of the good library authority set out by the noble Lord, Lord Tope.
In our area, we have about 150,000 people. Our libraries get more than 600,000 visits a year. We lend well over half a million physical items a year. I mentioned our mobile libraries. They make 105 stops every fortnight, bringing library services to remote communities, and especially to the elderly. Our online offering is growing very rapidly. It now gets more than a million visits a year and downloads are growing rapidly. To deliver these services—further to the point made by the noble Baroness, Lady Rebuck—we have 120 staff and nearly 200 volunteers from our community, and we would not be able to deliver our services without those fantastic volunteers.
There is also quite a breadth in what we offer. It is not just lending books and tapes and things like that. Four of our libraries are very modern and are part of school campuses. A member of the general public can walk in off the street through one door and be presented with a good library, or you can come in from the school. This is very helpful to the schools, because it allows them to benefit from the environment of a very serious library, which is much richer than would typically have been available in a traditional school library. Certainly Perth and Kinross Council feels this is a valuable model or numbers 2, 3, and 4 would not have been built.
We are in partnership with Citizens Advice Scotland and offer a programme Benefits Advice in Libraries. Perth and Kinross is one of the poorer parts of the United Kingdom, so we can use our premises and staff to help with that sort of programme, which does what it says on the tin. We have just been awarded a lot of funding to improve our digital skills programme, which is training people in our area in digital skills. These are just a few examples of how we are engaging with our community in ways that probably would not have been done in the past.
This is made possible because we have a strong and stable staff. The average length of service of our staff is long—very long when looked at with commercial eyes—and we have a very supportive local authority. The cloud on our horizon is caused by the way in which the Scottish Government are dividing their financial cake, which seems likely to lead to cuts for us which, rather awfully, will affect most those least well off in our community. So my first question to the Minister is: does he agree with me about the desirability of organisations such as Culture Perth and Kinross offering and continuing to offer the services that they do to their community?
I move to my second and final theme for the day. I am also a member of your Lordships’ Select Committee on Social Mobility, which delivered its report in the spring. It has yet to be debated. For the nine months before that, we heard an enormous amount of oral evidence and took a huge amount of written evidence from all over the United Kingdom on a broad spectrum of social mobility issues. Two of the great common themes that arose are relevant to today: first, that the availability of good-quality careers assistance and advice was inadequate; and, secondly, that going forward people typically might have several careers during their working lives.
Today, the venues for delivering assistance and advice are largely schools, colleges and job centres. I feel that we should tool up our libraries in this regard. Once people are beyond school and college age, today the jobcentre is their only option for getting a lot of this careers advice and assistance. There is, I am afraid, some reluctance among some people to go into jobcentres for that, particularly if they are in work at the time. I do not think they would have that reluctance where libraries are concerned. Indeed, libraries represent a very good potential nexus for providing careers assistance and potentially a good venue to provide the advice.
To be clear, assistance is about having the information and helping to get access to it efficiently. Face-to-face advice is a skill set which probably lies outwith libraries, but they could provide the venue. Culture Perth and Kinross had an awayday for the board and the senior staff just last month, where we spent some hours discussing this very theme. My sense of the meeting, which is reflected in the minutes, was that the board and the senior staff thought that it was a good piece of thinking, but we certainly do not have the money to put this evolution into effect.
In closing, the eighth, and last, recommendation of our Select Committee on Social Mobility was that the Government should do a cost-benefit analysis on increased spending on careers advice, because we had a feeling that spending on careers advice was economically positive for the UK. You spend a pound, and the economic benefit to the UK was greater. Indeed, analysis has been done by the Gatsby Foundation, under the able Sir John Holman, assisted by PwC, which very much shows that. I feel that a small amount of spend on libraries to develop careers support further would pay for itself handsomely in the UK. It would also greatly assist with keeping libraries open. Accordingly, I would ask the Minister whether he would agree to look into the idea that libraries play an increased role in careers support going forward.