Examination of witnesses (Questions 60
- 77)
THURSDAY 17 FEBRUARY 2000
COUNCILLOR CHRIS
HEINITZ, COUNCILLOR
LYN BROWN,
COUNCILLOR BRIAN
KNIGHT, COUNCILLOR
PAUL PORGESS
and MS GRACE
KEMPSTER
Mr Maxton
60. I think the impression was left last week
that I am anti-library, which is very far from the case. I think
your view of people reading on VDU screens in bed is a very present
one. Five years down the line, there will be some device at which
you can sit which will be the size of a book. It will look like
a book if you want it to look like a book but it will be a screen
inside, not a book, and you will be able to put on to that screen,
as there already is a CD-Rom on sale at the moment for £9.90
which has 1,700 works of literature on it, so you put that into
the thing and you can read whatever book you want. That does change.
That is the future. We cannot think in terms of just now; we have
to think of the future. I want to ask one or two other questions
about the local authority situation. First of all, as far as I
understand, most libraries, in terms of local authorities, are
in the leisure area. Is that right?
(Cllr Heinitz) Cultural services.
61. How many local authorities have it as part
of their education service?
(Cllr Knight) We do.
(Cllr Heinitz) That is a question that is almost impossible
to answer. My authority has it as part of cultural services which
is in a department with education, so is that part of education
or not part of education? I find it difficult. Libraries have
a hugely important education role; they have many other roles
as well. What is important is the delivery of service to the community,
not how it is located.
62. The links with the education service are
very important.
(Cllr Heinitz) They are hugely important.
63. For instance, do your librarians work with
schools? Do you have separate school librarians operating within
your system as well?
(Cllr Heinitz) Both.
64. In Scotland—maybe we are peculiar—some
school librarians feel totally isolated from the mainstream library
services.
(Cllr Heinitz) The vast majority of authorities run
highly effective school library services. Over and beyond that,
70 per cent of children use public libraries. The education side
of libraries' work is hugely important. Using that question, can
I also relay to you a real frustration with the way the Government
has funded local government and applied pressure? The slogan was
"Education, education, education". It seems to some
of us that that has been translated into "Schools, schools,
schools". One specific example: there was extra money for
local government last year. It was specifically intended for education
and Mr Blunkett made sure that every governor of every school
knew how much money, according to him, should have been passported
to schools. That meant that we were under huge political pressure
not to do as we might well have done, which is allocate some of
that education money to improving the library service, to support
education rather than transferring the money direct to schools.
I would point out the following things on that: children only
spend 15 per cent of their lives at school. The libraries are
there and used for the development of literacy before children
ever go to school. We are involved all over the country in very
active schemes to enable the development of literacy. The libraries
are open when schools are not. One has to remember that the current
organisation of the school year provides that long summer break
when many children potentially go backwards. Libraries actually
provide all around the country schemes to encourage reading through
that summer period. Libraries are of tremendous importance in
education. We recognise that. We wish the funding regimes to local
authorities realistically recognised how important libraries are
in the education sector. The other thing is outside the schools
libraries are the vehicle into lifelong learning and access to
learning for all those who are not of school age.
65. Our Chairman did suggest that at some point
you would get in your opening statement.
(Cllr Heinitz) That is part of it.
66. Can I turn to the point of access, because
it is important? Part of that is the opening hours which many
of you have had to curtail. I do not know if you have managed
to read last week's evidence but one of the questions I put was
that, with your Internet access, there is no reason why that should
not be available even when the library is not open, by separating
it out from the more secure part of the library as banks do with
their banking machines and so on. Are many of you doing that?
(Ms Kempster) In many parts of the country there are
innovative schemes to look at ATM libraries, if you like. I know
one example where there is a staff-less library with self-issue
but others are placing information points in community centres
and the like to be able to have access to the information part
of the information and inspiration role of public libraries. However,
when we ask people what they want from their library service they
do want everything. They want access when they want it; they want
a range of books melded with technology and they want access to
both information and also imagination. We do find that responses
to that meet half of the diverse reasons why people come into
their libraries and choose to do so every day.
(Cllr Knight) In my county, we have the Internet sites
in village halls; we opened one in a pub two weeks ago; we have
them in shops, doctors' surgeries, pharmacies, and we have support
for readers' groups inside and outside libraries with the idea
that we will have a reader group in a pub, say, where four or
five people gather together, consult a book and work it through.
I think we are taking the service way into the community.
(Cllr Heinitz) Access to the library service is also
a matter of the problem of the library service being set up largely
100 years ago and populations having moved quite considerably
and therefore a need both to relocate and provide libraries suitable
to the modern day and age. Every time you read about a local authority
proposal to close a library, it is assumed that that is because
of cuts in the library budget. More often than not, it is actually
reorganisation of a library service to meet the needs of the community.
I will give you one example in my own authority. I am deliberately
provoking the people behind me. In my authority, we have a small
town with a population of 11,000. It has three libraries. One
is a Carnegie library which is in a park on the periphery of the
town. The other two libraries are single room libraries that are
capable of carrying a stock that is even less than many good mobile
libraries. We are proposing to close those three libraries and
replace them with one library, a much better quality library in
the centre of this town, remember, of only 11,000 people, in the
area of the town where everyone goes every week, able to provide
a far, far better service than the vast majority of people in
that town get at the moment. We are talking about one good library
where everyone can get access to it instead of three libraries
that provide totally inadequate facilities at the moment.
Chairman
67. Would mothers with small children take that
view?
(Cllr Heinitz) Absolutely. Mothers with small children
would not dream of taking their children, most of the time, to
those two poky one room libraries.
(Cllr Brown) There are situations where councils do
close libraries because of the amount of money that it costs to
run those particular resources. In my own borough where we have
opened libraries over the last few years, we have opened three
and have one coming up but I have closed a library purely on resource
issues. It cost me £28 per book to issue a book in a particular
library and that was far too expensive for the service to be able
to cope with. We had to take a decision to close that library
and we have relocated a much smaller resource in the community
where people seem to enjoy it being and usable. That is not saying
it is a comprehensive service but it is a more efficient way of
providing the service to the people who live in that particular
area. Secondly, I know of a local borough—I have to say
I do not have in depth knowledge—where the discussion has
centred around to whom they are providing the library service.
Whereas, let us say, the north of the borough might be very well
provided for, the southern part of the borough, which has people
who live on lower income and who one might call socially excluded,
does not have the number of resources. The idea is to relocate
some of the resources from the northern part of the borough, which
is well provided for, to the southern part of the borough which
has people who live on low incomes and which is not well provided
for. When we are looking at library closures, we have to hear
from the local authority themselves as to the reasons behind the
closures because we do not do it easily; we do not do it lightly.
We do understand that it does cause quite a lot of angst and anxiety
from local communities who value that resource. It is very easy
for local authorities to take the easy option, to close a library
in an area which is not going to give you any brief, as in areas
where people are marginalised, where people do not have the clout
to mount campaigns. Is it not so much harder to take resources
away from well mobilised, articulate, professional areas. I feel
sometimes that we need to look at the arguments behind the reasons
why local authorities are doing things and maybe taking the harder
option because that might actually be the better option.
(Cllr Knight) We do not close libraries. The county
council has been in operation for 25 years and in that time we
have only ever closed one library. It was used very little and
the service was replaced by a mobile. Going back to the point
I made earlier regarding libraries being a very valuable source
of social interchange, we feel we are very loath to ever close
any libraries.
Mr Keen
68. We would not have embarked on this inquiry
if we had not been really concerned about the future of libraries.
You have answered some of the questions that Mr Maxton and we
have asked but I am interested in whether libraries should be
better funded in guaranteed funding under education rather than
culture, media and sport. You have already said that it is important
that under-privileged people are looked after. Would there not
be more scope under education for libraries to fill the gaps not
provided by the new technology that people can afford?
(Cllr Heinitz) There would be more scope for libraries
if there was a review of the whole regime of local authority funding,
first of all. Secondly, no, I do not believe they would. The history
of education authorities is one of marginalising the non-school
services. Look at what has happened to the youth service under
education services. I think each authority should take its own
decisions about how it structures according to how it sees it
suiting that authority. I do not think the argument about should
libraries be part of education or should they be part of cultural
services is a profitable one. I can think of some arguments in
favour of libraries being part of education. I can also think
of a huge number of arguments as to why they provide a much wider
service to the community and should be seen in that light, which
means, in many authorities, they have chosen to link libraries
with all the rest of the cultural services. I am talking about
the rest of the cultural services as defined largely by your own
remit and I would turn the question round to you: do you think
you should have responsibility for libraries taken away from this
select committee and put into the Department for Education?
Chairman
69. The select committee will not tolerate anything
being taken away from it.
(Cllr Brown) From my perspective, I entirely agree
with Chris. The youth service is an excellent example. I feel
that it would skew the book stocks and our book stocks within
our libraries would be used to sustain and provide for the national
curriculum, which is good and proper, but I think there would
be little scope over and beyond that for the lifelong learning
opportunities that many of our communities demand, desire and
require.
(Cllr Heinitz) And the recreational opportunities.
(Cllr Knight) Underneath our lifelong learning director,
immediately below him, is the head librarian. We find that connection
invaluable. Immediately above the lifelong learning director is
the director of education. Therefore the head of the library service
has very close contact with the director of education. The director
of education's budget is £250 million which means that the
library service tends to get looked after very well rather than
if it had its own budget. The cultural services budget is basically,
in our county, £10.5 million, but being part of the education
service I feel it benefits from that link.
Mr Keen
70. I asked the question not because I disagree
with what you are saying but in my own borough, Hounslow, we have
a community initiative partnership which is putting culture, media
and sport at arm's length from the council. It enables me to get
involved a bit more but there is a certain concern because it
is moving away from councils. Do you have a concern about that
happening? It is bound to happen in other boroughs, I would imagine.
(Cllr Heinitz) The LGA would not take a view on whether
the sorts of trusts and semi-detached are good or bad. The LGA's
view would be to provide authorities with as much information
as possible to enable them to make those decisions. I come back
to the fact that unfortunately some of those decisions have been
taken in local authorities because of desperation over funding
and particularly—this is an area of my opening remarks that
I have not managed to get in yet—out of desperation on capital
funding, because the restraints are such on local authority capital
budgets that the maintenance and new build that is required for
libraries is not being achieved. That is compounded by the fact
that we are now in a situation where let us say an authority has
a quarter of a million capital available. With that quarter of
a million of capital, it can spend a quarter of a million on a
library but it can spend a million or two million on a sports
centre because it can use the quarter of a million as match funding
for a Lottery application, which it cannot do for libraries. There
is a double squeeze on library capital that is both how few capital
resources a local authority has and the pressure to maximise the
use of those resources. You cannot maximise the use of those resources
in building libraries.
71. Presumably there is a way of DCMS keeping
an eye on the possible reduction in the library service but how
is it working so far? What impact has it had and how would it
go in the future?
(Cllr Heinitz) It is improving. The first year was
very difficult. We had very strongly the feeling that library
plans were being judged on the quality of the plan, not the quality
of the service, and there was a lot of evidence for that. We think
the annual library plans will make much more sense when the standards
document is issued, which we are working on jointly with the DCMS
and the Library Association, to produce standards. Obviously,
that will then relate into the annual library planning regime.
Largely, we are in favour and also the Local Government Association
has been very much in favour of the introduction of library standards.
72. When the libraries were under threat in
Hounslow, one branch library protest meeting had nine people.
At the Feltham Library meeting there were 29. At the other end
of the borough which is near Chiswick, there were 300 people there.
It makes it difficult for councillors to make decisions.
(Cllr Heinitz) No councillor willingly puts forward
library closures because they know what will happen to them when
they do. Unfortunately, over the years, that pressure has led
to the surreptitious, quieter, easier option of reducing book
funds which is just as damaging—in some cases more damaging—to
the library service.
(Cllr Knight) The only comment we have about annual
library plans is that they are a welcome practice but the number
of plans now being produced means that, with a cultural strategy
and the lifelong learning work, more professional time is being
put into writing the plans than delivering the product. I think
we have to be very aware of that. At the end of the day, we do
employ people to deliver a service and delivering the plan sometimes
deviates from the core object of the exercise.
Mrs Golding
73. Ms Kempster, across county, how is the decision
made for the opening and closing of library times? Is any effect
of the use of the library by different numbers of people taken
into account or do the county just decide these are the times;
hard luck?
(Ms Kempster) I can answer for Essex and maybe say
a little bit about my knowledge of practice elsewhere in the country.
There are some imaginative approaches to opening hours that are
existing in several authorities. In my own, we open permanently
on Sunday afternoons in 12 of our libraries. That was not due
to consulting existing library users; it was due to experimenting
and finding a whole tranche of people who could not access the
library at any other time due to their lifestyle and working week.
We were especially positive about access for mothers, families
and for particularly dads with their children coming in and finding
Sunday a time of great pleasure and leisure. In terms of how we
take those decisions, we do consult local people and offer options.
We try to operate within the very limited envelope, compared with
150 years ago, of library opening hours today. We make the hours
more convenient to people by, instead of opening from nine until
five, opening from ten until six. This not only enables children
to come in after school but also those who work locally have a
little extra time to come in. However, in including people in
those decisions, there is a rather fatalistic view by our library
users. They do not ask for what they imagine they cannot possibly
get and yet I find, for the first time in many years of working
in libraries, now is a time when people working in them are more
optimistic and excited about libraries' potential in lives than
ever before. They would very much like to be able to match the
kind of access hours into the evenings which would suit many people
today in their lifestyles; and, rather than comparing library
with library, comparing libraries with shopping centres, retail
outlets and, quite frankly, the kind of access that you and I
as citizens expect in our daily lives. There is an issue about
not just which hours and whether they are convenient and whether
they are the smartest hours to best meet local people's needs.
If we are looking at a very bright and optimistic future for libraries,
we must be looking at significantly extending those hours so that
they are for everybody, not just for those who can access them
at certain times. Today in Essex, 50,000 people will walk into
a library. Some of those will walk into a library that is mobile;
some will walk into a static library. Every one of those chooses
to do so for a range of reasons. They value and they cherish their
local libraries. There is a demand there that needs to be listened
to through consulting on opening hours and through consulting
on the future of libraries.
(Cllr Brown) I agree with what Grace is saying. Sundays
are a really good day for us too. We have our largest book issues
in our hours on Sunday afternoon, so it is widely popular. You
mentioned consultation. We are drawing up a library strategy for
my borough currently and we are trying to make sure that we consult
as widely as possible. That is not just with the current users.
We need to use a variety of different methods to make sure that
we reach those who are not currently able to access our libraries
at the moment. It is about contacting those non-users and making
sure that the service we are going to provide for them is relevant
and accessible. One of the ideas floated to us is providing services
where people are accessing other services, so it will not necessarily
add to a different timescale in a library element, but for instance
if we are trying to target young mothers with babies the best
place perhaps to get them is at baby clinics; it is not at libraries;
introducing them to a service at the clinic that says, "Your
baby is six months old or 18 months old. Your baby should be reading.
Let's show you how to read with your baby and these picture books.
Come to this local service here at the clinic and then join our
library as well." It is about drawing people in at the place
where they are accessing other services which are relevant to
being a library user. I think the library of the future is not
only going to be about static buildings and static nine to five
or even ten to six library opening times. It is about giving people
an ability to access a service where they are and in the most
appropriate means for them to do so. Would these be additional
hours you open on a Sunday afternoon? Would they be in addition
to a nine to five or ten to six service?
(Ms Kempster) Yes. Our own experience is that we piloted
it for six months and then we achieved additional funding to fund
Sunday opening. It was in addition to our existing resources.
I appreciate that that is going to be difficult for some authorities
to achieve but we have to go back to the service being led by
what people want and then seeking ways to find the solutions to
make that possible, not starting from where we are at the moment.
(Cllr Brown) In my authority, we did not have additional
funding for Sunday opening. I am unapologetic for it. I am reaching
more people. More people have been able to access my service on
a Sunday afternoon than during the week. For us, it is about making
sure that we make the optimum use of the resources that we have
available in the most appropriate ways to reach those people who
are most in need.
(Cllr Heinitz) You might like to talk to the Library
Association and UNISON about the difficulties we do have, those
of us who want to change opening hours to more suitable times,
about the demands for contractual pay arrangements of time and
a half and double time when we also run leisure centres where
the staff are quite happily contracted over a seven day period
and do not make those demands. That has led to real problems in
some authorities that have wanted to go towards Sunday opening.
Mrs Organ
74. I wonder if you could give me some information
or some profiling. My myth of libraries is that you are very good
getting toddlers, young children and their mums in. There is always
a corner for the kids. Then there are the pensioners looking for
the large print. What I am concerned about is how much are you
touching young men who are 16 to 25 and all sorts of other groups?
How much do you profile who is using your library other than the
librarian standing there thinking, "It's old Mr Jones again
looking for the large print" or, "It's that nice family
down the road"?
(Ms Kempster) In the ASLIB review of libraries, they
looked at who were the most intensive users of public libraries.
Perhaps much to the surprise of those assumptions about libraries,
the most intensive users are 16 to 17 year olds. They do not borrow
books but they come in to study, to make career choices, to meet
friends. In terms of another survey that was done more recently,
it shows that libraries are slightly over represented in the population
in terms of socio-economic classes C, D and E. What that means
is that the middle class myth of libraries is dead. It also means
that 73 per cent of people who use libraries left school when
they were 19 or younger. Although the visible part of libraries
is the borrowing of books and one notices during the daytime mothers
and older people, the truth is that libraries reach into parts
of our communities more extraordinarily than any other public
service. They have to reach across all kinds of people who rub
shoulders uniquely in the library environment.
75. That is encouraging. I am concerned about
the appraisal of annual library plans of 1999. It states that
only about a third of authorities had considered location and
access to libraries in their social inclusion policy. That rather
misfits with who the users are but the people who are planning
the access and the location of where they are, only a third of
them are looked at. How high a priority on authorities is it to
link where the libraries are, the access to the library, the activity
of the library is linked into anti-poverty strategy and social
exclusion; it actually sits right next to it, because how many
local politicians and managers are really committed to the linking
of it? Some may be in the vanguard and some may not.
(Cllr Brown) I sometimes wish my leader was less enthusiastic
about libraries. It might mean that parts of the other parts of
the service that I provide might get a look in. Our own strategy
has two aims. It is about combatting social exclusion and providing
services which enhance lifelong learning. There is a vast amount
of work that is going on at the moment around social exclusion
and around how we best meet the needs of those who are socially
excluded. There is the stuff in Tower Hamlets with their information
store; there is a group that have a number of discussion papers
around social exclusion. What is happening currently is there
is debate about how best to do it. In my authority, the debates
are where we are providing the service points and are we meeting
those most marginalised by the service points we have. Newham
almost universally has major pockets of social deprivation so
for us it is not about where you locate the library service in
order to meet the social exclusion because you are going to meet
socially excluded people in most part of the borough where you
are going to locate a library. The issue is about where you locate
the service in terms of building and emotional access to meet
the needs of those socially excluded. There are good pockets of
activity, of policy development and pilots going on across the
country that will be shared and will become more prevalent in
library authorities, because I do believe that is, when councillors
get together, a major priority for the delivery of that service.
76. There is a problem, is there not? Your authority
might be at the vanguard of that but I am concerned because there
is rural poverty and social deprivation in the shires up and down
England. I wondered if they have the same since only a third of
authorities are thinking about it.
(Cllr Heinitz) That was the first year of annual library
plans. That does not mean only a third were thinking of it; it
was only a third that put that as one of the core issues in their
first draft of annual library plans. We have organised at the
LGA seminars to support authorities in drafting those library
plans. It is something that is coming on. The DCMS will tell you
that there were great improvements in the second year of library
plans and in fact they decided that none of the local authorities
failed on their submission of library plans this year as opposed
to the previous year. Also, the LGA highly welcomed the DCMS's
PAC10 report on social inclusion in arts and sport but we tried
to give them a swift kick at the same time over the fact that
the PAC10 report did not deal with libraries because we felt that
social inclusion was so important with regard to libraries. Subsequently,
they have produced a specific report that all local authorities
are looking at with great enthusiasm and interest into social
inclusion and libraries.
(Cllr Porgess) This partly goes to Chris's point about
funding. I have only £56,000 of capital for a town of just
under 300,000 for next year for the whole of our community services.
We have mapped indicators of poverty by census enumeration districts.
We have identified pockets of real deprivation in some of the
more affluent areas in our town. We closed two single room libraries
last year. We closed one library because the heating system totally
failed and we could not afford to replace it. We used that money
for a mobile library. Where that mobile library stops is guided
by our indicators of poverty. The other issue of that comes to
ICT. How can you provide that in a mobile library? That is something
we are looking at but we have not solved it yet. With limited
funding, it is not really possible to provide libraries in places
where they are needed now.
77. My final question which comes generally
about access and a bit more about what you have mentioned about
mobile libraries—this thing about the whole hours problem.
As time goes on people quite rightly expect their public services
to be just like a consumer service. There is 24 hour retail shopping
so why is there not 24 hour access to libraries? Are we going
to be going that way? People will make demands about what they
expect. How does that fit exactly with Best Value, what is happening
with the funding regime, but there are going to be expectations.
Added to that, the second thing which is about mobile libraries—one
of the things is great, we launch a mobile library but it only
stops at the village at ten in the morning when they are all at
work or they are all out. Why is not the mobile library here at
seven at night? We do not want the mobile library in the daytime;
we want it when we want the access. How does that fit with Best
Value and the funding you have got?
(Cllr Heinitz) It does not fit with the funding we
have got whatsoever. Many of us would love to have the resources
to develop library services in the way you are talking about.
I come back to the fact that I have been talking to colleagues
around the country. Many local authorities in the coming year
are making cuts in budgets again, other than outside the schools
budget. You cannot go on increasing services as you are suggesting,
or even keeping services at a static level, against reducing resources.
You can start doing things like reallocating those resources but
every Commons select committee would like local government where
it is appropriate to reallocate resources to the area that they
deal with. The only solution there, which I would want to storm
the barricades, as would the whole of the LGA, would be for the
Government to determine ring-fenced funding for every service.
The result would be that we would no longer have any form of local
government in this country whatsoever; we would merely have local
administration of central government and I do not think that would
fit with any government's view of devolution in this country.
Chairman: With such a firm and final
statement, I think that is a good point at which to conclude this
part of our proceedings. Thank you.
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