Library Services: Thornton-Cleveleys

Lord Vaizey of Didcot Excerpts

Tuesday 14th June 2016 Westminster Hall

[The Minister for Culture and the Digital Economy (Mr Edward Vaizey)]

I am grateful for this opportunity to respond to my hon. Friend the Member for Blackpool North and Cleveleys (Paul Maynard), and to appear in front of you, Ms Dorries, the Chair of this important debate. You are an extremely distinguished and best-selling author, and I gather that “The Angels of Lovely Lane”, the latest novel in the award-winning series that you have produced, is about to be—or has just been—published. It is certainly available to pre-order on Amazon. I just wanted to get that on the record because, obviously, libraries are about books—but, as my hon. Friend pointed out in his very eloquent speech, libraries are about a lot more as well. I congratulate him on securing this debate and on putting the case for libraries so strongly. Although he is obviously here to defend the libraries in his constituency and local area, a lot of what he said stands for libraries all over England as well.

I am the libraries Minister responsible for England—it is important to note that libraries are a devolved matter as far as Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland are concerned. I am lucky enough to have been the libraries Minister for some six years, and indeed to have been the shadow spokesman for the four years before that, so I am pretty familiar with most of the issues and I remember the Wirral inquiry well. Indeed, it was me who called on the then Secretary of State to call that inquiry. I asked him to call it because at the time—I agree with my hon. Friend—there had been no proper investigation of the library service. Wirral Council had effectively taken a survey of its buildings and decided which it should close, but it had not actually taken a survey of its library service and how that could be most effectively delivered.

Of course it is perfectly appropriate for councils to look hard at their library services. It is perfectly appropriate for them, in difficult economic circumstances, to look hard at all the services that they deliver to see whether they could be delivered more efficiently. In fact, across the country there are many examples of library services that are being innovative. For example in Suffolk, where library services have become an industrial and provident society, libraries are remaining open, they are more innovative, their opening hours are longer and they are more popular. The head of the library service in Devon, Ciara Eastell, who has recently retired as the head of the Society of Chief Librarians and has done a fantastic job in that post, recently presided over the move by Devon libraries into a mutual organisation.

Libraries have a bright future and I will always take the opportunity to talk about the success of the library service. Too often, as my hon. Friend pointed out, libraries seem to be at the back of the queue for many local authorities. Also, paradoxically, many of the people who claim to have libraries at their hearts and to see them as important spend their entire time doing down the library service and claiming that it is on the point of collapse and in crisis. Indeed, when I asked the then Secretary of State to call his inquiry into the Wirral library service, I made the point—as I have ever since—that at no point as the Opposition spokesman did I ever accuse the library service as a whole of being in crisis. I was quite happy to call out particularly egregious examples of local authority behaviour but I did not believe then, and I do not believe now, that the library service is in crisis. It is having to modernise.

We take library closures as an indication of the health of the library service and I bat figures between myself, library campaigners and, I am afraid, the BBC, which has not been as accurate as it could have been about the number of library closures. It is always difficult to have an accurate figure. That might sound surprising; most people would look at a library and say that they know what a library looks like, but people can have different interpretations of the definition of a library. As far as we are aware in the Department, just over 100 libraries have closed their doors and some 200 libraries are open but managed by the local community and volunteers. There are still 3,000 libraries in England that can count as part of the statutory service. Some £700 million is spent a year for libraries to provide the great service that they do to my constituents, my hon. Friend’s constituents and others.

My hon. Friend was quite right to point out his concerns about what is happening in Lancashire. As he also pointed out by mentioning the £15 million that Lancashire had discovered, councils are not all-seeing and all-dancing, and it is possible for them to make different decisions. However, it is also important to remind ourselves that libraries are funded by councils and run by councils. Central Government have never run the library service and have never funded the library service, but they do have the backstop of the statutory duty.

I want to look briefly at what is happening in Lancashire. I am afraid it has seen a decline in the number of visits. I gather that visits have fallen by a fifth, and the number of active book borrowers by around a quarter. I also understand that the two libraries in my hon. Friend’s constituency have experienced a significant decline over the same period—in visits by about a third, and in active borrowers by just over a quarter.

The council has undertaken two consultations this year on the future of the library service. The first was undertaken in January. The council consulted on possible budget savings for the next five years, and one of the options included a rather dramatic proposal to reduce the number of libraries from 74 to 34. The 40 that were due to come out of the council service would either be closed or run by local communities. Just as an indication of how popular and important to the local community libraries are, I point out that that consultation drew more than 10,000 responses. The council then considered the responses and is now undertaking a further 12-week consultation. That consultation is under way and, as I understand it, is due to end in mid-August. The proposals have changed slightly. Instead of only 34 libraries, the council now proposes 44 libraries: 37 fully staffed and resourced and an additional seven that would not be staffed but would have all the facilities of a council library, including self-service counters and the opportunity to reserve and return books. There would also be six mobile library vehicles, a home library service and the virtual library service.

The council is aware that there is interest from the community in taking on the responsibility for buildings or taking over the running of the parts of the service that the county council will not maintain, and it has invited expressions of interest. I understand that no final decision will be made on any of the proposals until the council’s cabinet has had the opportunity fully to consider and evaluate all the information gathered.

[Paul Maynard]

Does the Minister agree that it is vital that Lancashire talks to borough councils such as Wyre about its plans for the libraries if it is, as it says, open to new ideas?

[Mr Vaizey]

I certainly agree with that. If the county council were not engaging properly with borough councils, I would find that extremely surprising and it would cause me significant concern. It is very important that county councils get out of their silos and talk to the local borough councils. Indeed, one of my hobby-horses is that councils should talk to their neighbouring councils, so the county council should talk to other councils outside Lancashire as well. There is a way councils can keep libraries open while reducing the back-office costs, the administrative costs, of libraries, and that is by sharing services. In fact, in west London, Westminster, Kensington and Chelsea and Hammersmith and Fulham in effect merged the administration of their library service. That not only saved them £1 million a year in administration costs, but enabled them to open a library. The Conservative authority Windsor is also opening libraries because it runs its service so efficiently. It is possible to open libraries even in a difficult economic climate.

I am sure that my hon. Friend understands that it is difficult for me to intervene while the consultation is still going on. There is some debate about my capacity or rather my willingness to intervene. In fact, this is the first Administration that has routinely looked at every single proposal from every council to close libraries. My officials investigate every proposal before them and test it against the 1964 Act, which my hon. Friend mentioned, and the duty to provide a comprehensive and efficient library service before deciding whether to intervene. Again, it may sound paradoxical, but sometimes councils may decide to close a library in order to run a more efficient service.

The first case that I had as the libraries Minister was Brent. On a political level, that was an open goal: it was a Labour council proposing to close six of its 12 libraries. However, when that was looked at in some detail by my officials, it was clear that the council should have been thinking about the future of its libraries some five or 10 years ago, but obviously the political hot potato that is a library prevented that council from making decisions that actually might have ended up meaning that it ran a better, more efficient library service, able to provide better services to more people, with more opening hours. Those are the kinds of decision that we have to weigh up, and we have to respect as well the role that local councils play in running a local service, but that does not mean that my hon. Friend is not perfectly entitled, and rightly so, to put the alternative case and to put it as forcefully as he has done in this place today.

In the minutes left to me, I want to say a few words about the national picture. I have made it clear that although Ministers do not run libraries and we do not fund libraries from a central Government fund, we have the backstop of the statutory library service. We have gone a lot further than that, however. Early on after the 2010 general election, we moved responsibility for libraries to the Arts Council, to a bigger organisation, joining up libraries with cultural provision, which was long overdue. The Arts Council had a £6 million fund to support culture in libraries, which has been very effective. Just before the 2015 election, we set up the leadership for libraries taskforce. At national level, that brings together key stakeholders—for example, the Local Government Association, the Society of Chief Librarians and my Department—and they work very hard to spread libraries’ best practice.

My hon. Friend asked what help Lancashire’s library service could get, should it choose to seek it, from central Government. One thing it could do is engage with the leadership for libraries taskforce. We have consulted on a draft vision, called “Libraries Deliver”, and we intend to publish the final document quite shortly. That will contain examples of best practice and of what innovation different library authorities can bring to bear in order to provide a more effective library service.

We have also been more practical still. For example, we spent some £2 million or £3 million ensuring that every library in England had wi-fi. It may surprise hon. Members to know that in a digital age—if one is looking for reasons to visit a library, surely one reason is the opportunity to access wi-fi and therefore do one’s homework or do some research on one’s tablet—more than 1,000 libraries in England did not have wi-fi. Now, thanks to us, they do.

We have published two best practice toolkits for libraries. We have brought co-ordination and focus to promote National Libraries Day—the one day in the year, in February, when we can talk about how important libraries are. We have invested in the enterprising libraries programme with the British Library. That allows key city libraries to work as hubs for entrepreneurs, updating the value that libraries bring to their communities.

On every level, we have tried to promote innovation in libraries; and the Society of Chief Librarians, for example, has promoted the value of books and reading not just in and of itself and for literature, but of course for health and wellbeing and a variety of other aspects. In an age when the summer reading challenge, for example, reaches more children than ever before, we see the library service evolving.

I for one think that the library service has an exciting future. I hear my hon. Friend’s perfectly legitimate and well-put concerns about the future of Lancashire libraries. I join him in urging Lancashire County Council, during this consultation, to think imaginatively, to look at new models of delivery that have been implemented elsewhere, to listen carefully to what he has said about the more efficient use of existing resources, to understand the passion and enthusiasm that the local people feel for their library service and to engage with the leadership for libraries taskforce about what opportunities there might be to learn from best practice elsewhere. As with every proposal to close libraries, we will keep this proposal under review, and if appropriate, we will act.

[Nadine Dorries (in the Chair)]

Mr Maynard, would you like to come back quickly with any further comments?