Question to the Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport:

To ask the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport, what steps she is taking to support public libraries in Gloucester.

Public libraries are funded by local authorities and each local authority is responsible for assessing the needs of their local communities and designing a library service to meet those needs within available resources.

I understand that Gloucestershire had 32 local authority-run static libraries as of December 2023, with five of those libraries located in Gloucester itself.

The government is committed to getting local government back on its feet. The provisional Local Government Finance Settlement for 2025-26 makes available £69 billion for local government, which is a 3.5% real terms increase in councils’ Core Spending Power on 2024-25.