Public Libraries

Lord Vaizey of Didcot Excerpts

Tuesday 7th September 2010 Westminster Hall

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Culture, Olympics, Media and Sport (Mr Edward Vaizey)]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend the Member for North Swindon (Justin Tomlinson) and I will attempt to rise to the challenge. First, I welcome you, Mrs Main, to the Chair. This is the first time that I have had the opportunity to debate under your chairmanship. You and I came into the House together, and it is always a little depressing when one sees a colleague rise in advance of oneself, as you have, but in your case I can say that it is thoroughly deserved, and you have chaired this debate in a consummately professional manner.

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for initiating the debate and for the many excellent points that he made. What characterised his speech, which perhaps does not characterise many of the contributions on libraries that one reads on blogs or in newspapers, was that it was relentlessly positive. He saw the opportunities that exist in the library service up and down the country, and by and large I can say that that was the case for the many excellent contributions that we heard this afternoon, including from my hon. Friend the Member for Wirral West (Esther McVey), who talked about the need to modernise, and from my hon. Friend the Member for Pendle (Andrew Stephenson), who illustrated the fact that his libraries are being innovative. The concerns of my hon. Friend the Member for Brigg and Goole (Andrew Percy) and the hon. Member for Chippenham (Duncan Hames) were valid and illustrated their awareness that libraries are a force for good in their communities. They were simply encouraging their local authorities to think again about how to be more innovative.

My hon. Friend the Member for South Swindon (Mr Buckland)—a man I have known for many years—reminded us that traditionalism and modernisation can co-exist and create a whole that is greater than the sum of the parts, as it has indeed done in the person of my hon. Friend.

Although I want to make a relentlessly positive and enthusiastic speech, I will just pause for about 30 seconds to make a cheap party political point. It is interesting to note that the coalition Government have fielded no fewer than seven Members of the House, whereas the Opposition, who presided over the decline in library usage that we have learned about over the past five years from the statistics produced by the Chartered Institute of Public Finance and Accountancy, have not fielded a single Member of the House to talk about their own thoughts and plans for libraries. When I was in opposition, I found extremely frustrating the lack of action from the Government in providing a leadership role.

I said earlier that one thing that I find depressing about the libraries debate is that so much of it is couched in negativity and quite a lot of it is based on a lack of knowledge and a huge degree of ignorance. It was interesting for me that in opposition, when we discussed the library closures in the Wirral—in the constituency now represented by my hon. Friend the Member for Wirral West—and in Swindon, I was, I think, the only Member of Parliament who bothered to visit both places and at least felt that I knew something of what I was talking about. Most people were happy to get on their hobby-horse and talk about the closures, never having got into the detail of the debate.

Much of the debate is conservative with a small c and somewhat negative. I myself see a huge opportunity and an optimistic future for libraries. I am an enthusiastic champion of libraries and will do all I can, in the time that I have as a Minister, to encourage local authorities to cherish and value their libraries, but also to innovate and modernise in their libraries.

In opposition, before I had been sent to the coalition Government’s re-education camp, I did want to set up a library development agency. I learnt in government that first, we have no money, and secondly we are not particularly pro setting up quangos. It may therefore appear somewhat confusing that one of my first acts as a Minister was to abolish the quango responsible for libraries—the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council—so I had better square the circle regarding how that decision came about.

That gives me an opportunity, first, to say how grateful I am to the council’s chairman, Sir Andrew Motion, its chief executive, Roy Clare, and all the team who so ably support them. The MLA has come to the table and understood the political necessity of saving overhead costs and delivering as much money as possible to the front line. We are working hand in hand with it to ensure that we have a smooth transition and that its functions continue to be carried out at the same time as we achieve a cost saving. As my hon. Friend the Member for North Swindon said, that is the kind of thinking that should be going through the heads of library authorities up and down the land.

I am confident that we will have a smooth transition. The specific detail of what will happen has not yet been decided exactly, but we are working closely with the Arts Council, for example, to look at the future. The Arts Council already supports important reading and literature initiatives—notably, the Reading Agency, which is behind the summer challenge, in which my hon. Friend realised his vocation as an elephant. That gives me an opportunity to praise Miranda McKearney and all those who work for the agency, because they do an enormously valuable job in encouraging children to read.

In the meantime, I am delighted to say that I have had the opportunity to put in place the library support programme. What is exciting about it, albeit that my press release was couched in slightly bureaucratic language, is that it brings the Local Government Association to the table. It explicitly recognises that local government has a huge role to play in library organisation and that diktats from Whitehall should not dictate the pace of change in local authority libraries, which should be local authority-driven. I am absolutely delighted that Liberal Democrat councillor Chris White, who is in charge of the programme, has worked so well with us to realise its aims. More than 100 local authorities expressed interest in getting on board, and more than 30 are now part of the initial stages. It is important to stress that libraries are a local service and that it is not for the Government to tell local authorities how to run their local library service—we exist to encourage and support. In particular, I hope that the library support programme will bring together different views about innovation and modernisation and enable best practice to be shared.

It is not all doom and gloom in the library service. We absolutely acknowledge the passionate support among the local community for the Old Town library, but one of the frustrations about the Old Town library campaign, as my hon. Friend will acknowledge, was that Swindon was somehow seen as withdrawing from the library service, when, in fact, a new £10 million library had been built literally half a mile down the road. The same is true up and down the country. If one goes to Norwich, one will see the Millennium library, which is the most visited library in the country, with 1.5 million visitors. In Newcastle, Her Majesty the Queen opened a new central library with a great new civics facility, which already has a podcast from me on its website, just to enhance the service. Manchester has blazed a trail, with the first public library to be successfully co-located with a further education college. It has also announced a full-blown strategy to develop its central library and a network of community libraries. York saw the first private sector sponsorship of a library service in the country, with £300,000 from Aviva. Luton and Wigan are examples of the successful operation of library services within charitable trusts. I could also talk about Essex and Leicester, and Hillingdon has already been mentioned. The library service in Kent is now seen as integral to delivering local authority services. Tower Hamlets has re-engineered its libraries and attracted a whole new group of people in to use them. There is therefore a massive amount of innovation.

The trouble with the library debate is that the minute one mentions an example of innovation, people throw up their hands in horror and say that everything is going to hell in a hand basket. If someone happens to mention that Hillingdon has put coffee shops in its libraries, people throw up their hands and say, “The Government want to turn libraries into coffee shops.” No, we do not; we just think that there is nothing wrong with being able to buy a cup of coffee and then read the paper, borrow a book or access the internet. I tried to make a speech that I recently gave about libraries slightly more interesting by mentioning that there is a library in a pub in North Yorkshire. It was immediately said that the Government want all libraries to be closed down and put in pubs. No, we do not. As my hon. Friend so eloquently said, this is about putting library managers and the people who run the library service in charge. If they think that their local community would find it easier to visit a library in a pub, they should be entitled to try that out.

There are some key principles behind the library support programme and the Government’s support for libraries. Local authorities should ask themselves what their library is for. Of course it is about books, borrowing and reading, but it is also about digital access, inclusion, access to the computer network and information. As my hon. Friend the Member for South Swindon said, the library is a place to have thinking time and to be quietly contemplative. Libraries are also great community centres for people who are new to an area, and refugees, in particular, find them a fantastically useful resource that can help them begin integrating into the local community. Libraries are also a massive resource for helping local councils to put services in front of local residents.

As my hon. Friend the Member for North Swindon said, however, library authorities also have to look at where they can cut costs. I have gone on record again and again as saying that it is a matter of intense frustration that there are 151 library authorities. Before I risk contradicting myself, let me say that I will not impose change or force library authorities to merge, but it is absolutely sensible that library authorities should find ways to work together. I was delighted that Hammersmith and Fulham and Kensington and Chelsea, each of which has six libraries, will now work together. Even so, Hillingdon has 18 libraries, which is three times more than Hammersmith and Fulham. Rutland has five libraries, and I am delighted that it is working with Lincolnshire, which has 61. Library authorities therefore cover a huge range of sizes, ranging from 80 or 81 libraries in Kent down to five in Rutland, and it makes sense for people to work together to try to save on bureaucracy.

Instead of thinking of a library as a cost—as somewhere where savings have to be made—local authorities should think of it as a resource, where innovation can happen. We are moving into the digital age, and people will be reading e-books, so they will want a place to go where they can be introduced to and try out new technology. In the same way, libraries in the 19th century were set up to introduce people to books, when books were an expensive resource and not available in every household.

Training is also incredibly important. If we are to put library managers in charge, we must also ensure that we concentrate on training them and librarians so that they can provide a service for different kinds of users.

[Andrew Percy]

One issue that we have not talked about is post offices. My area has lost a number of post offices in the past few years, and along with the post office we also lose the village shop. Will there be discussions between Ministers about how we can get the Post Office to work more closely with library authorities on possibly co-locating?

[Mr Vaizey]

What concerns me about that intervention is that my hon. Friend has clearly bugged the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills. About 45 minutes ago, I was having a discussion with the Minister responsible for post offices. I said that there is a clear correlation between libraries and post offices as community resources. I would be delighted to have discussions with my hon. Friend, because he, I and the Minister responsible for post offices are clearly on exactly the same wavelength.

The location of a library—location, location, location—is incredibly important. I have talked about libraries co-locating with GP surgeries, health centres or, indeed, supermarkets. Again, the headlines said that the Government planned to close down libraries and put them in supermarkets or, indeed, leisure centres. However, the key point, as my hon. Friend the Member for North Swindon said, is ease of use for users and residents. If co-locating means that libraries can stay open longer without additional costs to the taxpayer, or that they can increase their footfall and the number of people passing by who say, “Oh, there’s the library. I must just pop in,” that must be a good thing.

I will bang the drum for libraries and campaign for them. I will make the point again and again that I am not abdicating my responsibility when I emphasise the fact that local authorities are responsible for libraries. Libraries are a massive resource, and I am happy to stand shoulder to shoulder with local authorities in encouraging them to innovate, cut costs and move forward into the future.