Baroness Rebuck
Main Page: Baroness Rebuck (Labour - Life peer)
Baroness Rebuck (Lab)
My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Bird, for initiating this debate and for his spirited contribution. For me, the big issue—if I may borrow a phrase from the noble Lord—is books and their enduring importance to civil society and the extent to which both bookshops and libraries are essential to their continued success. Without both, we will not achieve 100% literacy, which is an essential aim in the 21st century and a bedrock of social mobility, social cohesion and a strong economy.
I declare an interest as a publisher and founder of two literacy charities: World Book Day for children and Quick Reads for emergent adult readers, for which Lord Bird contributed one of the first books. I am also chair of a high street bookseller campaign, Books Are My Bag, to which I will return.
Books have been central to our history—in particular, the history of ideas—and to human experience: first, painstakingly handcrafted and painted; then hot off Caxton’s printing presses; then sold as sixpenny paperbacks; finally mass-marketed for a post-Second World War public hungry for self-improvement; and now digitally available at the click of an icon. From the pages of books have come fable, soap opera, knowledge, solace and inspiration for hundreds of years. Matthew Arnold, writing in 1869, believed that social equality would result from the spread of culture— that all people could live in “sweetness and light” if exposed to the civilising influence of books. I am sure all of us here today love books. For me, as a publisher, it is a passion for discovering new talent and valuing reading as a way of changing people’s lives.
The publishing industry as a whole contributes £10.2 billion a year to the UK economy, of which retail sales from books account for £5 billion, and whether we go for a hard or soft Brexit, hardcovers, softbacks and digital books will have a significant role to play in our export market in terms of jobs and growth. Last year book exports were over £1.4 billion, and Europe accounts for more than a third of that. But we do not know whether we will continue to have access to the single market, whether our exports will attract tariffs, whether we will continue unimpeded to hire the essential international staff we need, or even whether intellectual copyright will continue to be adequately protected.
The entire publishing industry supports more than 200,000 workers in the UK and there are 2,270 UK book publishers currently registered here for VAT. Most importantly, books sit at the epicentre of the UK creative industries, responsible for £84 billion of our economy annually and growing year on year. Broadway and West End hits are often adaptations of great books by British authors, such as Roald Dahl’s Matilda or Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. Film also relies on the creativity of our authors. The top three grossing film franchises of all time—“James Bond”, “Lord of the Rings” and “Harry Potter”—are based on books by UK authors. Television, too, takes inspiration from works by our finest authors, such as the late PD James and Ruth Rendell, two former distinguished and much-missed Members of your Lordships’ House, and, more recently, dramatisations from “The Night Manager” to “DCI Banks” or the continuing franchise of the riveting, reinvented “House of Cards” of the noble Lord, Lord Dobbs.
The noble Lord, Lord Bird, spoke eloquently about the delicate book ecosystem and the crucial role of libraries and bookshops. They also play a vital role in developing the talented authors of the future. Ask any novelist what made them want to write and I guarantee the seed was planted when they discovered the joy of reading—a joy which began or was augmented through visits to their local library or bookshop.
Recently, many of our top authors, including Philip Pullman, Malorie Blackman and Michael Holroyd, wrote to the new Secretary of State for Culture, pointing out the crisis in the library sector. Since 2010, too many libraries—I have 343; the noble Lord, Lord Bird, said 500—have shut. Opening hours have been cut, alongside educational programmes and mobile libraries, and 8,000 trained library staff have been lost, together with hundreds of thousands of new books. There has been a 93% increase in volunteers—amazingly, this civic-minded army of helpers is larger than the entire staff of some of our well-known book chains. This is all due to the impossible choices local authorities have to make when their central budgets are slashed.
Libraries should be seen as key community centres, open to all, where, alongside books, people can rely on other essential life services. Arts Council England recently evoked a vision of libraries as cultural and performance hubs for local communities. Reversing the decline in library provision and ensuring that every school has its own library will be a start to reversing the decline in the literacy skills of our young. We are the only developed nation where our young people significantly underperform their elders, according to the OECD’s 2012 survey. Our poor performance is also affecting our economy. It is estimated that more than 9 million adults of working age in England have low basic skills, which is costing our economy around £80 billion per year.
However, bookshops are also under pressure, as your Lordships have heard. The number of independent bookshops has halved since 2005 and they continue to be under threat, with expensive rents, as we have heard, and business rates, while their online competitors trade from warehouses in less expensive out-of-town locations. Online retailing of books has been welcomed by consumers, who can shop at any time of the day or night and have books delivered to their door. They can elect to read on an electronic reading device, most choosing a Kindle, where Amazon invested early and heavily in the UK, achieving over 90% of e-book sales.
If we want a diverse and healthy market in bookselling, we urgently need to consider the competitive landscape in both e-books and physical books. But why does any diminution of high street locations actually matter? Let market forces prevail. But bookshops bring something that online just cannot do. As bookseller Rohan Silva, a former adviser to Downing Street, says, if you buy online and click on a book by a specific author, the other books recommended to you will fall resolutely into that same category. That is not how it works in bookshops. The careful curation they bring provides for serendipity, with displays arranged to encourage discovery and staff who get to know the customers, and whom customers trust to recommend new books that may otherwise never get read.
If you know what you want and prize convenience, you will order online but if you want the serendipity of discovery, you will visit a bookshop: an exciting cultural hub where research has shown that about 70% of new book discoveries take place. Bookshops, alongside book groups, literary festivals and talks by authors lead to the enriching of our cultural life. Algorithms cannot yet replace his. They cannot replicate the eagerness, enjoyment and wonder that I saw on the faces of young children as they sat and browsed in the children’s section at my local—and now sadly defunct—Books Etc. on Saturday mornings.
Watching children at a local bookshop just across the road from my daughters’ school—one of London’s largest state primary schools, on a housing estate in Bayswater—led me to think about how the UK could join the international celebration of World Book Day. That led to the charity, which is now in its 20th year, making a connection between schools and local bookshops. More than 13 million £1 book tokens have been given to children each year to exchange in bookshops, together with the special production of £1 World Book Day books, which are effectively free, allowing children to experience the joy of bookshop discovery and reading. But the leading creative position of UK publishing, the global influence of British authors and the whole extended creative industries which thrive on books are in danger of collapsing if we do not have a diverse and vibrant high street for bookshops, both chains and independents, as well as a decently funded library system.
We publish hundreds of thousands of new books a year and the democratisation of access to books via print on demand or digital-only editions has encouraged an explosion of self-publishing and crowd-funded books. But very few new authors, carefully curated, funded and edited by publishers, will be discovered without choice on the high street. Our independent bookshops are the places where unlikely bestsellers are made, but for many indies it is a hand-to-mouth existence powered by passion and a love and belief in the transformative power of books, rather than the usual returns of a business. Some independents are able to develop only thanks to the philanthropy of authors such as James Patterson, whose financial grants have helped nearly 300 indies to date. From Scarborough to Surbiton and from Peckham to Penzance, independent bookshops have been awarded grants for basic repairs, renovations, new projects and storytelling corners to help boost a love of reading in the young.
Our bookshops, such as the newly refurbished Foyles in London, are temples of culture which we would be foolish to allow to wither away. This is why publishers, bookshops and authors have joined to create Books Are My Bag, a campaign initiated pro bono by the company of my friend for many years, the noble Lord, Lord Saatchi, which underlines how a passion for books and literature, and pride in our unique global contribution to letters, is an issue that resonates across parties.
I am coming to the end. The big issue is: how can government assess and help to rebalance the competitive landscape in bookselling in the UK, and encourage more people to value our bookshops before we lose them altogether? Central government also needs to address the funding deficit in local authorities, where competing essential services too often result in library closures. Our trajectory towards one library per 50,000 people is simply a disaster. We have a stark choice. If we lose our celebrated bookshops and libraries we will never improve our nation’s literacy. We will also lose our next generation of authors and the source of our competitiveness in the creative industries. This simply cannot be allowed to happen.