Public Libraries

Lord Liddle Excerpts

Thursday 12th September 2024 Grand Committee

[Lord Liddle (Lab)]

My Lords, I was a Cumbria county councillor for 10 years, until last year. We never closed the library, but we greatly reduced opening times and greatly limited the supply of new books and materials as a way of balancing the books. The general solution to this is of course local government finance reform, but there is no point in arguing about that today.

If I was the Minister, I would do two things. First, I would set up a non-departmental public body to bring together best practice of the people in the field who understand how we can modernise libraries and integrate them, and use that as a consultancy for the whole sector, run from the Government. Secondly, I would establish a fund to which people could make bids for imaginative modernisation proposals.