Lord Suri
Main Page: Lord Suri (Conservative - Life peer)
Lord Suri (Con)
My Lords, I thank the noble Lords, Lord Bird and Lord Ashton, for securing the time for this very important debate. We live in a services economy. In these Brexit times, when people talk of manufactured goods or rules of origin, I feel that the role of institutions in nurturing some of our most productive industries is neglected. Libraries are one of those institutions that are a cog in the machine that drives our prosperity and plugs our current account deficit with the world.
I have recently come back from my party’s conference in Birmingham, an enjoyable pilgrimage that I have been making for over two decades. While I was there, I had the pleasure of visiting the city’s vast new public library. It is the 10th most popular visitor attraction in the UK, studded all around with great multicoloured rings. Inside, the warm hubbub and generously filled shelves make one feel at home. I confess that I spent more time in there than I should have—time I was meant to spend in the ICC—but I have no regrets. This was the heart of the local community, and I felt like a visitor in a welcoming home, watching children run to see if the books they wanted were in and parents enjoying the peace that brought. Those children will read widely and fruitfully, and I have no doubt that some of them will go on to be the doctors and engineers that our economy needs, especially with lower EU migration.
The educational significance of libraries often takes a back seat to the community ideals that we prioritise. Fundamentally, books can expand the mind. Studies show that when we read books, we can empathise with the characters and feel what they feel, as the author intended. I was a bookseller in Kenya, in east Africa, and owned a very large bookshop. My personal experience is that a mind open to learning, whether it is a child’s or a grown-up’s, is always attracted to reading books. The mere action of entering a room fringed by books helps to focus the mind on the matter at hand.
In my local shopping centre, Ealing Broadway, the second-floor library is an oasis of calm for students. Around May, the place starts to fill up, until it is full to heaving by June. There are also computers, vital for those who need to fill out online forms. The shift to online registration for council services has resulted in there being far more demand for the computers in the library.
Listening to the Chancellor’s speech in Birmingham, I got the general flavour of a relaxing of the fiscal tightening we have seen since 2010. He mentioned that we must prioritise the industries that we excel in and develop the infrastructure around them. If he is serious about that, he could well start by reducing the cuts pencilled in for library budgets. Libraries have lost a quarter of all paid staff since 2009, and their budgets are due to be cut further. As they provide a space for young people to get on with their revision and learn, as well as being useful community centres, there is a clear interest in at least maintaining current funding levels. I would wholeheartedly support such a policy, as part of a new post-Brexit economic policy. The circumstances in which the previous Chancellor set his fiscal rules have changed. So should our policy.