Future of Public Libraries

Tony Vaughan Excerpts

Wednesday 14th May 2025 Westminster Hall

[Tony Vaughan (Folkestone and Hythe) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Mr Dowd. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Mid Derbyshire (Jonathan Davies) for securing this timely debate.

Public libraries are critical community centres that educate and enlighten. They are used disproportionately by people from disadvantaged socioeconomic backgrounds. In December 2022, in my Folkestone and Hythe constituency, our main library in Folkestone town centre closed, and it has remained closed since. The library opened to the public in its current location in 1888. It is one of the oldest Carnegie libraries in the country and operated in a beautiful grade II listed building at Grace Hill.

In 2024, Folkestone was named the best place to live in the south-east of England by The Sunday Times, but there is a high level of inequality in my constituency. Three wards in the town are among the 10% most deprived in the UK, and Folkestone library has played a critical role in supporting many people, including families and elderly people who are living in poverty. The library was not some relic of the past. It was not merely a borrow-a-book service, but had become a hub for the community. It had free wi-fi and computers, it put on activities and events, and there was a local heritage service for local historical materials.

I do not want to talk too much about the Conservatives, but the sad reality was that the library, run under Kent county council, had been neglected and was allowed to get into a state of disrepair so that, today, the cost of repairing the building is around £3 million. That would have been much less had the repairs been carried out when they ought to have been.

Kent county council is now run by Reform. One of the first things said by the new leader of the KCC, Linden Kemkaran, was that she wanted to

“appoint some sort of DOGE”.

I took that as a reference to the Elon Musk-led US Government body responsible for savage cuts in the US, including in education. I gently suggest to her that after 14 years of Tory austerity, savage cuts are not what we need. I call on the new leader of Kent county council to commit to saving Grace Hill library, and to work with me and local stakeholders to make that happen.

I have never given up on reopening Folkestone library. I believe it has a future. Tying the library to the existing tide of Folkestone’s regeneration is crucial. Both national and regional government should support regeneration that has already proved successful. We need regeneration to help to fund libraries, and in Folkestone that regeneration has already happened to a degree, through the development of the creative industries over the last 20 years. There is a proposal to extend that further, with a new creative campus that would make arts an even stronger magnet for creativity and economic growth. The library is part of that. A £10 million investment in the creative campus could deliver a curriculum for creatives, creating a multi-use arts and communal space, space for the community to gather, a library offer and so on.

As a community, we know that if we want to reopen the library, we need to be creative and think outside the box. I thank the Minister for coming down to see what Creative Folkestone has done. Alastair Upton, the chief executive officer of Creative Folkestone, and I were incredibly grateful to the Minister for giving up his time to see how Folkestone is leveraging the arts to regenerate our community.

I pay tribute to Jon O’Connor and the Save Folkestone Library campaign, who have collected thousands of signatures and worked really hard to come up with a community vision for the library. It is that spirit of campaigning that will keep libraries alive. As others have said, the future of libraries has to be based on what already works. It also has to be based on regeneration and rely on sources of funding other than traditional funding models. Upskilling the creative campus idea would allow the teaching of existing creatives and provide a hub for activity of all kinds.

I believe that through strong campaigning, determination and thinking creatively about the future, Folkestone library can be saved, but it will need the help and support of the new Reform-run Kent county council. I will seek to meet the new leader of the council and whoever is in charge there to make sure that the library reopens for the good of the people of Folkestone.