Libraries, Bookshops and Booksellers

Lord Griffiths of Burry Port Excerpts

Thursday 13th October 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Griffiths of Burry Port (Lab)]

My Lords, of all the places on the face of the planet where the subject we are debating might cause most surprise, it should surely be this Chamber. We are all of us formed by books, even the noble Lord, Lord Bird, who had to wait until Her Majesty’s pleasure to achieve those skills and is now a learned man able to hold his own in intellectual exchange. We are all of us the fruit of learning and intellectual activity, and nothing epitomises that better than a bookshop or a library. It seems odd to me therefore that we should be spending a couple of hours on a Thursday afternoon feeling the need to make a case for these objectives. We are the evidence that these objectives have, in our case, been achieved and we therefore stand as the living evidence before the world of the need for them when we leave this place.

However, as we are here discussing this, I had a bit of a wheeze. Our Library is a truly remarkable place, and no more remarkable service does it provide than our briefing notes for these debates. The one that it prepared for today is astonishing, and I would be surprised if anyone speaking in this debate has not dug deeply into it. I had a feeling that if I could have got four other speakers in the debate to take it in turns with me just to read the Library Note, so that it got on the record, we would have made the case in trumps. We would have saved ourselves an awful lot of time too. It is a remarkable and wonderful piece of briefing material. What does it do? It sets out, in brief form, the corners of the world and social and political activity, from which emerges the strong advice that libraries are essential to the well-being of any properly organised society. UNESCO is there; the Arts Council has done its report; even the Department for Culture, Media and Sport has commissioned work that comes to the same conclusion; the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals agrees—you would expect that, as there is a bit of a personal interest involved for its members, but at the same time they know the truth here better than anyone else—and the Booksellers Association comes to the same conclusion: libraries are good for us, and bookshops are a proper thing to expect to see on our high streets.

On cost/benefit analysis, which we heard mentioned a moment ago, the briefing note looks at the benefits in the world of economics, health and well-being, education and culture, and comes to the same conclusion all over again: this is an investment in the many facets of a properly organised and balanced social activity for a nation, community or neighbourhood. It is all there in the briefing paper but here we are fulminating, voicing our anxieties and saying we want more attention to be given to libraries and bookshops because we feel that, despite that evidence, there is a diminishing degree of investment in what ought to be an infrastructural part of a properly organised and healthy society.

In my own case, before I had any books of my own, there were libraries. I do not quite share the beginnings of the noble Lord, Lord Bird. I could read, I passed the 11-plus examination and went to a grammar school. This debate and the previous one actually belong together; in terms of social mobility, they are two sides of the same coin. My brother, who failed, did not read, although he was as intelligent as I was. It took the trade union movement to give him his opportunity to be socially mobile as a shop steward and then as a regional organiser, and then he was offered a place at Ruskin College, Oxford, this boy who failed the 11-plus and did not know how to read—most extraordinary.

For me, though, it was the Burry Port public library that fed me intellectually at a time when I could not afford books. When I became a student of English literature—I got a degree in it and went on to teach at the University of Wales—it took me until I was 16 to have a book to put on a shelf at all. What would have happened to me, for all that my grammar school was brilliant, if I had not had a library at my disposal, as well as the working men’s club with its newspapers and its intellectual exchanges? Remarkable intellectual resources were available. Yet here we are, at this point in our nation’s history, thinking that all the advances in which we can ascribe some importance to these social developments are now under threat. It is a sad day indeed.

If you go into a library, what do you see? You see child reading circles, all the way through to interlibrary loans. Do they still exist? I used to be able to milk the interlibrary loan system for brilliant books from all over the world. Just fill in the form, come back in a fortnight and you have the book you want. I did not have to go to the Bodleian or the Cambridge University library for those books; I had them in Burry Port, a tiny backwater in south Wales. I hope that does not go on the record. They will never forgive me if they hear me call them that.

We are living at a time when information is increasingly in the private domain, with people looking at their screens. I am not a Luddite and it is fantastic that you can find what you want by pressing a button, but that robs you of lateral interests and cross-referential possibilities, of having two or three things open on the table so that you can see how things work out together. Then there is social interaction—“Have you read so-and-so?”. Put two or three people together and you have an informal seminar in a minute. Libraries offer safe space, at a dangerous time, for children and vulnerable people to sit and enjoy social activity and to be together in each other’s company. We do ourselves no service if we rob ourselves of facilities of this kind and if we do not see that the money put into developing libraries in this way is not a drain on the public purse but an investment in the future of the country. It is simple—a no-brainer.

There is a question that has been referred to already which I would like the Minister to resolve. I think the 1964 Act makes it clear, but none the less the department says:

“In considering how best to deliver the statutory duty each library authority is responsible for determining, through consultation, the local needs and to deliver a modern and efficient library service that meets the requirements of their communities within available resources”.

The responsibility is put squarely on the local authority. Yet the Act says that,

“it shall be the duty of the Secretary of State to superintend, and promote the improvement of, the public library service provided by local authorities in England and Wales, and to secure the proper discharge by local authorities of the functions in relation to libraries conferred on them as library authorities by or under this Act”.

That seems to be a contradiction; I would like it resolved, and I wonder if the Minister will do that for us. Is the Secretary of State right to discharge his duty simply by passing the buck to the local authority? No; I see the Minister’s head being shaken, and that reassures me. I hope the shaking of the head will lead to a torrent of words in passionate defence of the principle that I am adumbrating so that I can go home and have a cup of tea with some contentment.

It should be a truth universally acknowledged that any civilised society worthy of the name must be in want of libraries.