Nadine Dorries
Main Page: Nadine Dorries (Conservative - Mid Bedfordshire)Library Services: Thornton-Cleveleys
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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?
