British Library Board (Power to Borrow) Bill

Neil O'Brien Excerpts

Friday 13th March 2020 Commons Chamber

[Bim Afolami]

It is close by. There are plans to open a site in Leeds, but more important than all of that is the work that the British Library does in different communities across the country. One reason why the Budget was so good for the British Library is that it will help to increase its number of outposts with public libraries to 20 across the country, with 18 of those operating a hub-and-spoke model: that is where the British Library works with a public library in a large town, with that large town working with smaller villages and smaller towns around it, thereby extending the British Library in effect all the way through to every community in our country.

That is the primary reason for giving the British Library the ability to borrow, because borrowing enables it to take advantage of certain opportunities that may not be possible through a grant. That ability, combined with commercial activities and the rest, can help the British Library do that more and, moreover, perform more than just the functions that we imagine typical of a library—the lending of books, the provision of somewhere to work and so on. Business and intellectual property centres are growing hugely in popularity in the British Library in London and all over the country, and the British Library can help to sponsor the exporting of that model in the country to give many more people the opportunity to set up a business and have the right advice when doing so.

My hon. Friend the Member for Thirsk and Malton (Kevin Hollinrake) is a successful businessman, which is one reason why he is in this place. However, he will know many other people who could have run a successful business if they had had the right advice at the beginning. It is very important that we ensure that. That is one of the functions of a modern 21st century library.

[Neil O'Brien (Harborough) (Con)]

Does my hon. Friend welcome the support in the Budget to extend the network of the intellectual property office to 20 centres around the country? That will provide a wonderful advantage to small businesses in my constituency.

[Bim Afolami]

It provides a very good advantage to small businesses. If anyone from the Treasury is listening, they will have heard how popular the Budget appears to be on the Government Benches as well as on the Opposition Benches. In this House, whether on Budget day or on big issues of foreign affairs and the like, we often focus on the macro big-ticket items, but often comparatively smaller things in money terms have the biggest impact in local communities. Libraries, and indeed the British Library, are an example of that.

The British Library is enjoyed by more than one and a half million people a year, with another 27 million visits to its website. Its origins in the British Museum Library go back 250 years or so. It is home to Magna Carta, handwritten lyrics by the Beatles and, I am told, even a gravestone. I am not quite sure where they have put it—perhaps in the same place as the “Ed stone” from the right hon. Member for Doncaster North (Edward Miliband). Sorry, that was rather mean of me, but I could not resist it.

When I visited the British Library last week to talk about the Bill, the staff were very kind. They showed me some of their manuscripts and exhibits, including manuscripts from the Anglo-Saxon era. As somebody who did his thesis on the development of the burghal system of Edward the Elder, that was a real interest to me, though not to too many others in the world.

--- Later in debate ---

[Neil O’Brien (Harborough) (Con)]

This is an excellent Bill, and I pay warm tribute to my hon. Friend the Member for Hitchin and Harpenden (Bim Afolami), whose constituency I zoom through every morning on my way here, for bringing it to the House. He has spotted an important lacuna in the law and an opportunity, at no cost to the taxpayer, to get more value out of one of our most important public institutions. I congratulate him on bringing the Bill forward and I hope it makes progress.

Like my hon. Friend, I want to pay tribute to the important role of books and public libraries in our community life, and in my own life. Like him, I probably would not be here if it were not for libraries and books, whether it was Kirklees library, which we have already heard about, which used to drive its little van around Dalton when I was a child, or Huddersfield public library—the children’s bit in the basement where I enjoyed much of my childhood. At university, I was lucky to be able to use the Bodleian, an incredible library, and to stand outside the Radcliffe Camera—for bibliophiles, it is this wonderful vent where the smell of old books is wafted at you on an industrial scale. I am not sure I ever really benefited from the intellectual resources of the library, but at least I enjoyed the smell.

In my own constituency, there is the wonderful work done by places such as Kibworth community library and Fleckney library, which is not just a great library; it also has a wonderful café and is a hub for the community where all kinds of other things happen.

[Mark Tami (Alyn and Deeside) (Lab)]

I wonder whether the hon. Gentleman has been to St Deiniol’s library in Hawarden in my constituency, which is the home of Gladstone. What is interesting about that library is that Gladstone had a habit of crossing out the things he disagreed with and writing in what he thought was appropriate, and it is fascinating to see those books.

[Neil O’Brien]

I thank the right hon. Gentleman for drawing that to my attention. It seems a typically Gladstonian move. I would love to visit that library at some point; perhaps we should have a library exchange.

It should be a great source of pride for this country that the British Library is literally, by catalogue size, the largest library anywhere in the world. It currently holds between 170 million and 200 million items and, frankly, I love the uncertainty of that. I have often wondered, “How do you know if you have too many books?” I think if one is unable to number them except within a range of plus or minus 15 million, it is possible that one has too many books. That is slightly unfair on the British Library, because it knows how many books it has; the uncertainty comes from the fact that there are so many other things in there, and my hon. Friend the Member for Hitchin and Harpenden already mentioned the gravestone and the possibility that the “Edstone” may reside there.

As well as 30,950,000 books, there are 824,101 serial titles, 351,116 manuscripts, 8,266,000 philatelic items or stamps, 4,347,000 cartographic items or maps, and 1.6 million music scores. As has been mentioned, the British Library grows its collection by 3 million items every year and currently requires 625 km of shelf space, which is growing by 12 km a year. To put that into context, that is enough for roughly three speeches by my hon. Friend the Member for Witney (Robert Courts)—[Laughter.] In the virtual space, the library harvested over 70 terabytes of web content for the UK web archive in 2016. We are not sure at present how many of the 70 terabytes consist mainly of cat gifs, but we do know that the library is cataloguing everything with a .uk domain, so we are in a slightly meta position here in that, as we speak, our words are being catalogued by the very institution that we are discussing.

The British library also contains a huge amount of recorded music and sound, much of which is available on British Library Sounds. I will return to this point about digital content, but someone can go on to the site, as I did in preparation for this speech, and listen to Dinka songs from South Sudan, endangered Micronesian recordings, which are sort of like mid-1980s rave music, or someone from the Edwardian era singing “Seventeen come Sunday” on to a wax cylinder. It is difficult to think of a more consequential library in history than the British Library.

[David Johnston]

I want to make a point about the UK publishing industry, which is another area in which we punch above our weight. It is worth £6 billion to the UK economy, and we have 10% of all academic downloads and 14% of the most cited articles. Does my hon. Friend agree that the British Library will be a key component of how we punch above our weight in this area?

[Neil O’Brien]

My hon. Friend is absolutely correct. It is a hugely important national resource, and I will be coming back to some of his points. Indeed, one of the reasons why the British Library has been somewhat dependent historically on grant in aid is that it has these statutory responsibilities.

Just think about the history of this truly wonderful national institution. The old reading room, when it was still part of the British Museum, was host for long periods of time to an incredible and diverse group of people, some of whom did not necessarily see eye to eye. It played host not just to Lenin, but Orwell, not just to Gandhi, but Muhammad Ali Jinnah, not just to Karl Marx, famously, but also Hayek. There was Oscar Wilde on the one hand, and Rudyard Kipling on the other. The list goes on and on: George Bernard Shaw, Mark Twain, Virginia Woolf, H. G. Wells, Arthur Conan Doyle. Imagine all those historical figures together. It would be the ultimate dinner party at the end of time, although perhaps a slightly combustible one.

In recent years, as my hon. Friend the Member for Hitchin and Harpenden mentioned, it has been policy to give greater freedom and operational autonomy to our national museums, and our sponsored museums have already benefited from a huge reduction in bureaucracy and the associated costs.

In particular, the freedom to carry over reserves has been hugely beneficial and a big source of stability in the financing of these institutions. It has also been important to them that they have been able to determine the pay for their staff, so that they can retain the best and brightest.

As has already been mentioned, other national museums that are sponsored by the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport have had the freedom to borrow following the reforms announced in 2013 and made permanent in 2015, but the British Library Act 1972 prevented the British Library from doing that. The Government’s strategic review of DCMS-sponsored museums in November 2017 concluded:

“Subject to Parliamentary time, DCMS and the British Library will explore scope for legislation that enables the British Library to borrow money.”

I am proud that we are acting on that recommendation. Removing the restriction brings the British Library into line with other national museums that already have the powers and gives it the potential to access more financial opportunities to support its growing work.

The British Library is still reliant on grant in aid for around 80% of its income, which is rather higher than some of the other institutions in the same category. I hope that the advent of the new borrowing powers will mean we can bring that percentage down over time to a level closer to some of the other institutions that are funded through the same channel. It is brilliant that the library is expanding its campus in north London, opening up new opportunities in what is sometimes described as the knowledge quarter around Euston and St Pancras.

I am conscious that while the library provides some amazing online services, as have already been mentioned, there is huge untapped potential, and that cannot necessarily be realised just through commercial partnerships. The library has done some interesting things with Google over the past couple of years, but there are limits to what can be done through more partnerships with commercial firms. As we have already discussed a little, the British Library secured £30 million of funding in the Budget this week to expand its intellectual property network to 20 centres by 2023, including, I am glad to say, one just over the border from us in Northamptonshire. That will help our businesses in Harborough, Oadby and Wigston.

[Joy Morrissey (Beaconsfield) (Con)]

I would like to highlight the work of the British Library and what it has done to promote entrepreneurship with its business and IP centres. As a Conservative, I believe in small business and entrepreneurship. The British Library has done an excellent job in promoting not only small businesses, but young entrepreneurs and ethnic minority entrepreneurs not just in London, but across the country.

I was able to interact with the British Library at a meeting of the all-party parliamentary group for black, Asian and minority ethnic business owners. A gentleman from Burnham in my constituency who is a business owner was there. It was wonderful to see the British Library so actively involved in trying to help start-ups, and I think we need to have such things across the country. We need to support our entrepreneurs at every level, and what is great about the British Library is that it is doing that for young entrepreneurs as well. It is using city libraries and existing libraries across the country to have these hubs and the results have been really positive. All that has a measurable impact for thousands of start-ups and young entrepreneurs. More than 12,000 businesses have been created with the network’s support since 2016. I hope my hon. Friend will join me in welcoming the new endeavour, and I hope the Bill will allow the entrepreneurship programme to expand across the country.

[Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Nigel Evans)]

Order. Before the hon. Member for Harborough (Neil O'Brien) comes back in, I have to say that the hon. Lady’s intervention was longer than some of the speeches I have given. By their very nature interventions should be short, as interesting as hers was.

[Neil O'Brien]

My hon. Friend made an important intervention that was, like the British Library, content-rich. I welcome her words. She is absolutely right that the British Library is helping entrepreneurs, and also that the Bill will help the British Library to be more entrepreneurial. It was the library’s brilliant idea to decide to set up these IP centres—the first in the world—and we are now helping it to expand them.

I welcome the fact that the British Library is going to renew the Boston Spa campus, with all the opportunities around that. The point about having borrowing powers is that it allows for the most to be made of opportunities. I welcome the fact that the library is exploring a presence in Leeds. I love the idea of British Library North. I really like the idea that it might use the old Temple Works. It is a famous building of the industrial revolution that at one point contained the world’s largest room, which is pretty cool. The only thing I would say—to grind my own axe for a moment—is that I would love to see some of these things happening in the midlands, especially the east midlands. So, “British Library, if you are listening, do not forget your old friends in the midlands! Please use your new borrowing powers to help us too.”

All the things that the British Library is doing create opportunities to drive economic growth, in small ways and big. The hon. Member for Batley and Spen (Tracy Brabin) made the good point that there is an excellent café there. It reminded me of the old advert for the Victoria and Albert museum that described it as a very good café with rather a nice museum attached. So there are small things but also much bigger things. One can imagine the physical regeneration and wonderful things that could be done in Leeds with the new campus. The fact that the British Library could borrow would let it go that little bit further.

This is a slightly different category of thing, but Network Rail recently rejigged Market Harborough railway station. It is great, but everything was replaced, like for like, whereas we could have made more of the opportunity of that regeneration. I hope that this new set of powers for the British Library will enable it to make the most of the opportunities and exciting things that it is doing.

I recently published a report on—Members should not groan—levelling up. It looked at, among other things, innovation, science and culture spending. I was struck that, taking Arts Council England and Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport direct funding of national institutions such as the British Library together, London received 47%—nearly half—of the total spending in England in the period from 2010-11 to 2017-18. Amazingly, that is a slightly lower percentage than in previous decades, but the spending is incredibly London-centric.

[James Cartlidge]

Is my hon. Friend aware that, in terms of growth of DCMS sectors in the economy, yes London is No. 1, but not far behind is the north-east?

[Neil O'Brien]

I thank my hon. Friend for that piece of information. It leads me neatly on to what I was going to say. It is striking that Arts Council England has targets and is aggressively moving to spend more of its budget outside London, which I welcome. It is starting from a base line of an absurd proportion of spending in London and is moving, although more slowly than I would like, clearly in the right direction. The reason why total culture is so heavily weighted towards London is not primarily to do with Arts Council England but mainly to do with directly DCMS-funded national institutions, of which the British Library is a main example. In that category of spending, 90% of the spending is in London. That is what drives the huge imbalance in spending. So many of the institutions that we love and cherish are in London. The Department is trying to do more elsewhere, but there is a lot more to be done.

Our national museums and arts institutions have become more innovative and commercial over time, because sometimes you have to speculate to accumulate. That is why today we will be giving them borrowing powers so that they can invest to grow.

It is true that the current British Library building on Euston Road is not as universally loved as the old domed reading room in the British Museum. There are so many wonderful things about that old dome. It had, funnily enough, a papier-mâché ceiling and it was opened in the Victorian era to a breakfast feast that included champagne and ice cream, which is my kind of library. The new building still had a much better fate than the French national library. Francois Mitterand’s library was built at the same time and has suffered technological problems, industrial relations problems and problems with thermal loading. The heat coming into the large glass L-shaped buildings was damaging the books, and the French press were quick to say that it was typical of a Mitterand project that it ended up cooking the books. The British Library has been more successful than that, and than the old Birmingham library, now demolished, which Prince Charles said looked like a place where books were incinerated rather than read.

Despite the fact the new reading room is not quite as beautiful as the old one, which Louis MacNeice imagined in his poem “The British Museum Reading Room” as a great beehive under which scholars worked away to store up knowledge, it is a hugely important national institution doing more and more every day to support our national life and economic growth. We should be proud of it. It is a wonderful institution. I am also proud of my hon. Friend the Member for Hitchin and Harpenden, who is today introducing an important piece of legislation that will support and protect an important national institution to do even more for this country.