UNCORRECTED TRANSCRIPT OF ORAL EVIDENCE To be published as HC 1088 - i

House of COMMONS

MINUTES OF EVIDENCE

TAKEN BEFORE

CULTURE, MEDIA AND SPORT COMMITTEE

 

 

Public Libraries

 

 

Wednesday 17 November 2004

MR TIM COATES, MS MIRANDA MCKEARNEY, MR JOHN HOLDEN and

MS HEATHER WILLS

Evidence heard in Public Questions 1 -

 

 

USE OF THE TRANSCRIPT

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Oral Evidence

Taken before the Culture, Media and Sport Committee

on Wednesday 17 November 2004

Members present

Sir Gerald Kaufman, in the Chair

Chris Bryant

Mr Frank Doran

Michael Fabricant

Alan Keen

Rosemary McKenna

Derek Wyatt

________________

Memorandum submitted by Tim Coates

 

Examination of Witnesses

 

Witnesses: Mr Tim Coates, Ms Miranda McKearney, Director, The Reading Agency, Mr John Holden, Head of Culture, Demos and Ms Heather Wills, Idea Store Programme Director, London Borough of Tower Hamlets, examined.

Chairman: Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. We are very pleased to see you this morning. We are returning to the subject of libraries. I say, rather conceitedly, that we got a pretty good reception the last time we looked at libraries and maybe we will do, in the eyes of others, as good a job as we did then. I will ask Rosemary McKenna to open the questioning.

Q1 Rosemary McKenna: Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. I am delighted that the Committee has made the decision to look at public libraries because, as an advocate of public libraries, I have long felt it was time they looked at the whole situation again. Can I ask each one of you what one thing do you think would have an impact on the public library service as it is today?

Ms McKearney: Getting clear about what they are there for and, having done that, shaping a few priority national programmes. Our particular interest is in the reading field.

Q2 Chairman: Could you speak up, please?

Ms McKearney: Yes. Getting clear what they are there for, which, for us, is about reading; and having done that create a shared national sense of purpose, agree a few key priority national programmes which deliver to some target audiences what only libraries can deliver. For instance, support for children's reading in the breaks from school and creating national economies of scale to deliver those programmes, which at the same time do not blow the local responsiveness, which is the key to what is so important about libraries.

Q3 Chairman: Could I just interrupt before Rosemary goes on? It may well be that Rosemary or other members of the Committee will address questions to one individual person, but if any of the panel feels they would like to answer any question, please feel free to do so.

Mr Holden: For me one of the big things is library buildings; I think there are a lot of very tired library buildings in the wrong place, configured wrongly and sometimes with the wrong stuff in them. In visiting a lot of libraries around the country I have seen that where there has been a combination of energy and reform, along with investment in infrastructure, it has worked. So I would like to see a well-conceived programme of capital investment in libraries.

Ms Wills: Based on our experience in Tower Hamlets, I would say that a clear vision of what is required is essentially echoing what Miranda said, based on speaking to people and finding out what the punters actually want, and translating that into clear outcomes of what is required, and I think there are a number of clear themes that would come out of that. And to deliver that, very crucially associated with that is a need for a joined-up approach. Libraries, public libraries in particular, look to DCMS look to DFES, look to ODPM and a whole host of other organisations at local and regional levels as well, and that makes the delivery of a clear vision problematic, to say the least.

Mr Coates: The public are very keen to have good libraries and they want three things. They want a much better stock of books and material for reading, learning and information; they want the libraries to be open much longer than they are; they want the libraries to be clean, smart and well presented, so that they are safe and good places to work and study. Those three things need to be done, and in order to do them the management of the service and the efficiency of the operation has to be improved beyond dreams, beyond all recognition because it is very, very poor at the moment.

Q4 Rosemary McKenna: I get the impression that libraries did become for some time the Cinderella of leisure services or education services, and a lot of it depends where the libraries sit within a local authority, and if they have an advocate. The local government will say that their budgets are constrained and therefore it is difficult for them to give the kind of finance to the libraries that is required. Is there anything that you can do to improve that?

Mr Coates: My belief is that there is £250 million a year out of the £1000 million a year, which is what the country pays for its public library service. Of that, £250 million a year is wasted in extremely old-fashioned systems, in duplicated work, in arrangements for cataloguing which are long outdated. In my opinion there is plenty of money. There is no shortage of money at all, would be my case, but it needs to be spent in a radically different way to that which it is at the moment. When I have talked to councillors - and I have talked to a lot - they are very confused because they get a very unclear picture from their own library operation as to exactly how it is worked and how the money is spent within it. So I think councils, who are the right people to run library services, in my view, need a lot more help than they are currently getting in learning how to run them more efficiently and more effectively for the public.

Ms McKearney: I certainly would not disagree with Tim about the need for streamlining and efficiencies. For me it probably starts at the top as well, because libraries have become curiously politically invisible, both in the local authority and at national government level and the DFES five-year strategy hardly mentions libraries; there is a huge chunk of the informal learning world just not recognised at all. So I think a clear lead from central government would help at local level as well.

Mr Holden: I think that is right. The way the systems work locally and nationally are very confusing for people outside it and advocacy at local level is often poor and, paradoxically, perhaps because it is a statutory spend and protected, there is maybe not the need to raise the voice in the way that there is for other parts of the cultural world. But nationally, who are the advocates for libraries? Who are the people standing up and beating the drum for them?

Ms Wills: I would endorse all of that. Again, coming back to the need for a focus on outcomes, if we had done more work in that direction it would be easier to convince many, many people of the contribution we make to so many different agendas, in terms of social inclusion, in terms of education, as Miranda says. By delivering the libraries' day job too we can do that, but (a) we have not had the outcome to show it, and (b) we have not been very good at marketing or communicating that to anyone.

Q5 Rosemary McKenna: Tim, you said that the £250 million was not properly spent. In your report you are saying that local authorities really need to get together. Do you think that could be best done by a directive from the DCMS or the Local Government Association? How would you see that happening?

Mr Coates: I think there is no mechanism at the moment for doing the work that needs to be done. I think there is a need for an urgent programme, almost an emergency programme if you like, in which four or five or six councils who wanted to reform themselves, who wanted to become better, went through every single process that they have and looked at all the resources and all budgeting processes and the planning processes and at the marketing and everything, and sorted themselves out, with help. They need support from a project team of some kind with seniority. Having got half a dozen sorted out properly it would then be easy to roll it out. But there is no mechanism for such a project team at the moment. It is something that should be in the gift of the Minister, if you like, because as I understand it the Minister has some powers of intervention and can go to a council and say, "Look, you really should do better than this," and I think that that power of intervention needs to be elaborated; it needs to have stages and it needs to be carefully thought out. But that project team ought to have the ability to use that power of intervention.

Q6 Rosemary McKenna: Which Minister?

Mr Coates: As it is at the moment it would be Lord McIntosh.

Q7 Rosemary McKenna: And of course Lord McIntosh is an advocate of libraries.

Mr Coates: Indeed he is. He just does not have the tool in his hand to take this action.

Q8 Rosemary McKenna: Actually to take it forward? That is something that the Committee would want very much to take on board because very often a pilot project like that can actually be rolled out. I know that that kind of work was done in Scotland and it did work, where our libraries are now doing extremely well and they are very well supported.

Mr Coates: I think in that project team it is important to involve the Audit Commission because in local government work at the moment the Audit Commission are the other people who have, as it were, the stick within their hands, within the CPA, and I think that project team should work with the Audit Commission to make sure that the carrots which are applied to the library service fit in with what the Audit Commission is doing, because at the moment there is a gap between what the Audit Commission do and what the DCMS do, and that leaves us with a road through which people can drive. They need to be brought really close together, even if only for three years. I understand that in the end they have a separate role to play, but for the duration of this project they need to make sure that they are both looking for the same thing, and councils know that they are looking for the same thing.

Ms McKearney: May I add something? I do not disagree with any of that but I think it is important as well to look at some very interesting models of national solutions to economies of scale that are emerging, and one of the things which cheers me up is the National Summer Reading Challenge that we set up just as a very small charity five years go. We were very heftily warned not to be so naïve as to expect that local authorities would abandon their own local summer reading activities for children in favour of a large national one, but it is now run in 91 per cent of authorities; the standard of activity that children get is incredibly high; it allows libraries to compete with credibility for children's attention; and it has now attracted funding from DFES. So it is that sort of magnet for investment. I think that models like that could be very powerful. As well as national partnerships we are just talking to the BBC about constructing a major partnership between BBC Learning and the Public Library Network, and they do not want to be working with 208 local authorities, they want to be working with one team that can deliver libraries to them, and that would have huge local knock-on benefits.

Mr Holden: May I add something too? I would not disagree with Tim at all in that there are huge efficiency gains in procurement, in management, in the way things are run, in building and so forth, but one sentence that he said, "to get it sorted out properly", I think that is the interesting issue. What do we mean by "sorted out properly"? What are we trying to aim for libraries to do? What are the measures that we are going to use? How do we know that they are successful?

Q9 Rosemary McKenna: Up to now we have been talking about books, and can we move on to the People's Network? I believe that is an absolutely crucial part of developing libraries and bringing more people in. I understand that it is available now in all authority areas but that in some areas a charge is levied for access to the People's Network, which I do not think was ever envisaged when the idea was rolled out at the beginning. Would you have a view on that?

Ms Wills: Certainly in Tower Hamlets, for the time being and for the foreseeable future, we would not envisage making a charge for direct access to the Internet; it is a crucial part of our service and a core part of the service we provide to support learning in our Idea Stores because our Idea Stores are libraries and Adult Education Centres as much else combined and the IT supports everything that we do in the store, whether it be activities for children, whether it be introductions to the use of IT for learning, introductions as to how to find your way around family history information. It underpins everything that we do and the provision of IT quality services is a major attractor to bring people into the service to go on and use other things as well. So I think many libraries around the country have found that it has been a re-generator of interest in the service and has brought people back to use other parts of the service as well. So it is absolutely crucial for us. What that leaves hanging, however, is the question about sustainability and we cannot underestimate the importance. We are fine now, we have invested in this and we will replace the odd PC as it falls over, but there is a very big question left hanging as to what happens as all of these PCs need to be replaced and all of the infrastructure comes to be upgraded? I would suggest that all the while each local authority is looking at that individually and trying to come up with its own technical solutions and its own procurement decisions that will continue to be problematic.

Q10 Rosemary McKenna: So there is a danger that that initial investment, because of lack of revenue, is going to be considerably undermined?

Ms Wills: I do not think many authorities have a full answer at the moment to how that is going to be sustained, ongoing at the moment. I certainly do not have any great guarantees as far as we are concerned, albeit that we are looking at it, and we are factoring some degree of provision into our medium-term budget plan; but I know it is a concern for many.

Mr Holden: On IT I am not aware of any figures about what proportion of libraries are charging and who is not. What I have noticed in a lot of library visits is that IT is used extensively; almost everywhere you go in the country when you walk into a library the computer terminals are used and there is a queue for them. But I think there is a lot of confusion in libraries about what we charge for and what we do not. Most libraries charge for DVDs, CDs, videos; they do not charge for books. Some of them charge for IT, some do not. Some charge when you want to get a book from the backlist or something, others do not. It is a very confused picture with little consistency.

Q11 Rosemary McKenna: I think the difference with IT was that it was about information. Libraries are basically about information, and it was about information and it was also about enabling access to people who had no other opportunity of having access and as an education tool.

Ms McKearney: It comes back to this question about what are libraries there for? If you go back to their roots, radical social roots, I think the best of them are rediscovering that sense of radical social purpose and free access to information. For me, whether that is through computers or books, that is a fundamental principle. I do not see a huge distinction. It is about reading, is it not? If you make reading at the heart of what libraries do that runs through the IT and the provision of books, and I think it would be fantastic if we could reach some clarity about what libraries' purpose is around reading because then that takes you away from their work being measured only by book issues, which I think absolutely does not capture the value of what they are doing.

Mr Coates: I have no problem with computers in libraries for information. I worry slightly when I see them being used for playing games outside parental control, which is what a lot of them are used for. As far as I can see there is no proper data being gathered about what the computers are being used for, but if they are used for the right thing that should be free - no difficulty at all about that - and I know that a lot of councils are looking for that. But like everything in libraries somebody will tell you a figure - and I do not know what figure they are bandying about - and say, "We need £100 million" or £50 million, or whatever it is, and they should look very hard at those figures when they come in because there are 30,000 computers in libraries and to replace all of them physically can only cost £10 million, and out of £100 million that is an economy. It is not a need for an extra wave of funding. The councils that I have been working with, if you read one of my articles there is a report on the London Borough of Richmond, where you can see that out of the £5 million available for that service £2 million of it is being used up in the office. Then they will turn round and tell you they need more money to replace computers, and I say just sort the job out first. But at the same time as they do not have computers their book stock is appalling - they have no Graham Greene, they have no Tolstoy there to be borrowed. That is also a priority, and the book stock is a much more expensive priority. So of course computers should be free for the use of information, but that is a symptom rather than a problem, in my view.

Q12 Derek Wyatt: Good morning. My local authority is Kent, which is the largest in Britain, and spends the least amount of money on libraries and in the poorest areas has the worst opening hours and the worst stock, which is madness and goes against the whole principle of what a library service is. So what do we have to stiffen to make it possible that there is equal access and equal opportunity to libraries? Do we need a new law? What do we need?

Mr Coates: The person who is not doing the thing that they should, to be brave, is the Chief Executive of Kent County Council because if they sat at budget time, which is this time of year for them, and they prepared a plan as the Audit Commission told them to do five years ago, and they looked at the money that they have available and they looked at how it was being spent in a critical way and in a managerial way, they would realise that they have plenty of money in Kent. I know it is not well-funded but ---

Q13 Derek Wyatt: It is wealthy.

Mr Coates: It is wealthy, that is right. But their book lending is down 25 per cent.

Q14 Derek Wyatt: It is appalling.

Mr Coates: And they have had all kinds of initiatives, all full of brave new worlds. It is not possible for a councillor to tell you what the answer is but it is possible for a Chief Executive to be firm about how budgets are spent. I do not think it is necessary to redefine and be clear about what libraries are for; I think we know. I do not think we need any more debates; I think librarians will debate until the end of time what they are there for. In fact the public in a MORI research poll will tell you in three lines what a library is for, and I think we should stick to that. The Chief Executive of Kent County Council, with help - and I would sit with him and say, "Look at this budget and see how daft it is because you are still paying for a bibliographic services department and you absolutely do not need that," they do not need them at all these days because of the systems that are available, book data and so on. They have duplication of staff in the sense that they have non-professional staff running the libraries and then they have a whole raft of so-called professional librarians who are in reserve, as it were, which just means that there are two levels of people when you only need one. There will be eight or nine levels of management, I guarantee without even looking, because there will be a councillor and then a Head of Library Service, a Head of Education, then a Senior Management Team, then a Middle Management Team and then a Libraries Team and probably several Area Teams, where, if you were a retailer running these things, instead of probably 250 people actually in the libraries you only need six. Those economies are quite visible, quite obvious and what is needed is for the Chief Executive of the Council to say, "I am sorry, this budget is no good, and we can recycle until we get it right, and we have six months. If you do not, fine, we will still open the libraries but let us have a different management team."

Ms McKearney: I really disagree with this thing about the debate because the external environment in which the libraries operate around reading has significantly changed. There is Internet bookselling, a huge explosion in book buying, a huge explosion of media interest in books. So what are the libraries' role in that? To me it is much more about lending books, it is about active intervention at key life stages in a way that connects policy and connects to the kind of society that we want. So it may be it is work with socially excluded young people who have come out of school unable to read, that the library plays a profound role in putting the bit of the jigsaw back in place, but that may not express itself in terms of worth, in terms of book issues. So I think there does need to be a debate about them championing reading and addressing some of our fundamental social problems, literacy not least amongst them. And that their role in that is understood and valued by the formal education sector as injecting critical informal learning into the system.

Q15 Chairman: Could I just interrupt you at that point, Derek? What you have just said, in my view, raises an absolutely fundamental question, namely, what are libraries for?

Ms McKearney: I hope you agree with me!

Q16 Chairman: I was brought up in a bygone era where libraries existed to have books which people borrowed and they borrowed those books to a very considerable extent for pleasure but also to get some information. On the whole, if people wanted information they went to the reference library as I went to Leeds Reference Library when I was at school. So I think it is a fundamental question, is it not, what are libraries for? If you will forgive me for going on a bit longer, one of my great pleasures, in travelling to this building on the tube in the morning, is to see people sitting in their seats on the tubes reading books. I think it is absolutely fantastic. All kinds of books. I may be old-fashioned - I probably am, but I accept that we live in a different world in that there is online communication, that people want information - but when you look at the response, for example, to the BBC's Big Read, this ethos that it is a good thing for people to read books for pleasure it seems to me is being lost partly because of the distractions (which I do not criticise) of the Internet, but also partly because of the economic privations to which local authorities have been subjected and the ethos that was imbued in local authorities of "Do not do it if it does not make a profit", which has led, for example, to my local authorities closing down the swimming pools, and has affected the whole approach to what has been one of the greatest inventions of a modern era, namely, libraries out of which you take books.

Ms McKearney: I am so glad that you said about reading for pleasure because for me that is the absolutely critical bit of the jigsaw that libraries can add in. The OECD research shows that if children like reading and do it recreationally it is a more important level for social change than their family background. Libraries are really getting into this in a very big way - active intervention to help children actually enjoy reading. The Adult Basic Skills Unit at DFES is beginning to look at reading for pleasure as a critical factor in Skills for Life Strategy and libraries' role in that. But libraries' role around that area has not been shaped or articulated very clearly yet, which comes back to Heather's point about what are we here for, what are we being measured by?

Mr Holden: I quite agree and it is a figure I use in the book I wrote about creative reading, about this importance of enjoyment and pleasure in reading. I think one of the things is that the more people read the better readers they become, and it is very important for people to become better readers. Literacy simply is not enough these days, it has to be about how well you can read not just whether you can read, because people have to exercise their creative skills and apply knowledge in order to enjoy their lives more and create economic value. It seems to me that a lot of the programmes that Miranda is involved with and others that some of the best public libraries are pursuing are having a really profound effect on reading levels in that way. I agree with you entirely that it is great to see people reading on the tube. The difference these days is that a lot more of them will have bought the books and so what, I say?

Ms Wills: Could I respond to the point that you started off making because I very much recognise the picture you painted of some of the areas in Kent, and I know some of those areas anyway. In Tower Hamlets five or six years ago we had buildings that were crumbling, open very strange, intermittent hours, a service that had not been invested in and, not surprisingly, nobody was using it. But the Council recognised that the money that it was spending on that service could be being used so much better, and asked how shall we need to do things radically differently to make people use our services? That has led to a radical turnaround, a strong concentration on the provision of library services and adult learning services in high quality environments, so that the people want to go and spend time there; open long hours during the week at the times that the people want them, based on market research with people telling us what they wanted to see; significant investment in books, making sure that we have the books that people want to see on the shelves. By doing that, which takes capital investment, which has included revenue investment by the local council - but our unit costs have gone way down because we have increased footfall into the buildings by more than three times the numbers who came into the new facilities that each of our new Idea Stores have replaced - book issues have gone up significantly, class enrolments into adult education have gone up significantly. There is another way of doing it.

Derek Wyatt: The dilemma I have is that, like the Chairman, I have always thought that libraries were the corner shop university, but I am now not always certain what they are. I think adding the computer section to the library, for which we were all evangelists, has confused us further. In a sense, when you look at what a community would need, it would want a really good central public library in each of your towns and versions of that in your villages if you could have it - or minor towns or small towns. But then you look at the schools and their libraries are shocking. They were the Cinderella bits of the 70s and 80s and so you have two sections in the community disconnecting, yet you have also got both sections of those which has computing space. Then you have UK online centres in your village halls and in your pubs, which do not connect to the library, and it seems to me that we disaggregated, by accident, without really thinking up here, "Look, strategically what we want" - if I could put it crudely - "is probably the BBC learning hub with the Open University," and that if we could ask the BBC to brand libraries and take over that role as a public service, instead of it being the local authority, we would then be able to say, "Look, we are going to put in a hub, we are going to put this amount of space in, we are going to connect the libraries in each of the schools and village halls and everywhere together." If we do not we are going to have this debate with you every five years and it will not go anywhere. The other thing that is coming underneath is that there is a disconnect between people and what we do here, and, if you like, we want a "Gov Is Us" store. People want to know what housing benefit is. There is nowhere to go to touch government anywhere. You used to go to the library because there were reference sections but they have cut those, and there are no reference sections anymore. You all say, "It is online," but people who cannot read cannot go online, and it is harder and harder to fill in forms and so on. It seems to me that there is a dilemma - I am making a speech here - about what it is we want in the community, and reading is only an element of that now. In my library I doubt if we have the top 100 books in this year - there are one or two of them in - in fiction and non-fiction. So what is the point? If you cannot get the best sellers what is the point of going? I am sorry about the speech, but I would like to understand whether you feel that strategically the government has not really understood the changes over the last five years?

Q17 Chairman: Not only the government - if I could add to that - but also the local authorities, local authorities understanding what their responsibilities are and accepting their responsibilities.

Mr Holden: I think part of the problem is a concentration on the product - is it books, is it IT, is it X, is it Y, when we should be thinking more what is the public need, what is the public value that we are trying to generate out of this? That might make libraries configure themselves differently in different places. It might mean that they have partnerships with different sorts of people in different places which provide all the elements you were just talking about. I know of libraries that have Citizens' Advice Bureaus in them - some do, some do not. I know of others where there are employment services inside of them, and that is perfectly proper in some places and unnecessary for others I suspect. So I think we ought to think about them, not in terms of the physicality of what is there and now being the definition, but the role that they play in society being their definition.

Q18 Derek Wyatt: Rosemary mentioned this - and we raised this before and we raise it all the time - the hours. If you do not have books at home, which lots of families do not, and you do not have computing space, and you shut at five, you do not run homework clubs like football teams do and rugby teams do, which is a shame because the library is the perfect place for homework clubs. So you do not open at the weekends after five o'clock, you are not open on Sunday when kids do their homework, and so on - and you know all this - is there a short-term fix where libraries could be told not to open until 12 o'clock, so that they stayed open until nine o'clock? How do we get them open when kids need them most?

Mr Coates: Every retailer in the country in the last 20 years has learnt how you do that; you just reorganise your staff time. Many people prefer to work in the evenings, they prefer to work weekends, and you just build up a rota of people who work the times that it suits them. But the libraries have resisted.

Q19 Derek Wyatt: Who has done that?

Mr Coates: Every retailer in the country.

Q20 Derek Wyatt: No, which local authority library has done that?

Mr Coates: None.

Ms Wills: Ours!

Q21 Derek Wyatt: One!

Mr Coates: I do beg your pardon. You should go and see the Idea Store in Bow. What Heather has done there is absolutely fantastic and it is not just what she has done, if I can pay tribute to her, but the energy that she and her colleagues have put into that operation is the management that is missing everywhere else in the country. That is the solution to the problem. She has been so brave, what she has gone through with her council - and she gives credit to the councillors for doing what she has done. One has to pay public tribute to what they have achieved in Bow. It is marvellous.

Q22 Derek Wyatt: It is seriously that easy, and there is only one authority - you - that has done this?

Ms Wills: I would not say we were the only ones. There have been authorities who have moved to Sunday opening, but it is a challenge, there is no question about it. Any change is challenging. You need a clear vision of where you are trying to end up and you need to take people along with you and find a different way of doing it. Sometimes that is challenging within the service and sometimes it is challenging outside the service. Every local authority has its own set of circumstances but there is proof that it can be done, certainly.

Q23 Derek Wyatt: So if we had an exemplar or best practice, would that help?

Mr Coates: Actually Westminster Council were boasting just recently that they have increased their opening hours quite dramatically and that it has had a fantastic effect on the number of people using it and the evening class students and so on. It is the opening hours and then having in stock the evening class books. You go into your libraries in the evening and people are starting Spanish for their evening class or archaeology for beginners - you know the things that everybody does in Floodlight, in September of the year. Go in the library and you will not find any of those books. The library will be shut anyhow, but they have not bought anything in September. The stock is the key really, and the other key ingredient is opening.

Q24 Alan Keen: We have rightly started with basics and it is proved that that is where it should start - no question about that. In my own local authority, Hounslow - and I represent the western half of that - they have hived off leisure services, including libraries, to an arm's length organisation to take advantage of being able to apply for grants and benefit on the VAT side. Our local authority, like so many others, the government has tried to make them more efficient by reducing the revenue support grant and so it has made it very, very tough for the local authorities. To be devil's advocate, supposing we shut the libraries altogether? There is a vast amount of them; there are billions of pounds worth of property involved and masses of revenue spent every year. If we shut them altogether what would we actually lose? How many adults, for instance, use the libraries? What would we lose if we shut them altogether and where would we have to replace the stuff that we lost? What would be the biggest loss if we closed the libraries completely?

Ms Wills: I am sure we could all give a very long list. I would have at the top of my list a contribution to "life long learning" in its widest sense, from the support to under-fives, the ages at which they start their learning and being introduced to books, to classes coming in and becoming aware and learning the range of services that are available, to support for people as, has been said, for adult evening classes. In Tower Hamlets particularly, where people have been very strongly turned off, in many cases, the formal learning experience over many, many years, access to a learning environment and the resources to support that in an informal, non-threatening space, and an environment in which it is pleasant to spend time, is absolutely crucial in terms of increasing people's skills. So you would actually find a very significant effect over every level of the skills and the education and training spectrum. I am sure other colleagues would have issues that would be brought to bear.

Q25 Alan Keen: We would lose that in Tower Hamlets - and Tim has been praising you for what you would produce there - but would we lose that in 95 per cent of other local authorities, Tim, or would that not be there to lose?

Mr Coates: It is still true to say, as people do, that even now the library services are hugely popular. It is popular in the sense that I think it is about 95 per cent of the people will tell you that it is a wonderful thing and should be good. But even now there are as many books borrowed from libraries as there are books sold in the country. My grumble is that only 15 years ago it was actually twice as many books were borrowed and that has been the collapse, but even now you have the order of 300 million books a year are borrowed from libraries. So it is a fantastically popular service, particularly for children and families with small children. They do an enormously important job in the local community. You mentioned the aspect of how important they are to smaller local communities; they do a job that no other retailer does, for example. I suppose the nearest thing is the local pub, but the library is the serious alternative to a pub, if only it were open.

Mr Holden: For me there are two really big things. One is that libraries are probably the most trusted places that there are, places of politeness and civility, and there is not enough of that around. So I think that is something that you would lose. Another thing that you would lose is that, for kids like me who had no books in the house, there would be no access to books. There are still a lot of people who cannot afford books and they need libraries.

Ms McKearney: These guys have said it all really. Libraries are a mark of civilised society, are they not? They embody a set of values as well as all those services - and you have covered all the reading bits. They mean something and a set of values are attached to that shared civic space, which I think would be a huge loss.

Q26 Alan Keen: I agree with you. It was simply a question of course. Tim has mentioned a lack of national co-ordination - and I do not want to waste time in asking you to give the same answers as you gave before - but if you could write our report what would be the main thing you would put in that? I see that it is outstandingly necessary to get some sort of national co-ordination, an organisation with real teeth, not to dominate the local libraries but to help them.

Mr Coates: I have tried to write it in my memorandum; I have tried to put exactly what I thought you should say really, which is cheeky. We do not want to change the structure. I believe that the local council element is really essential. You will only give good service to local communities if there is a political cycle where the local person can go to the local council and say, "My library should be open at 9 o'clock." You will never get that if it all becomes a national operation, I do not think. Even the local councils think it is too big in some instances, that it wants breaking down a bit into smaller operations. So I think the local management thing is terribly important. But what they do need is so much more help and support in contrast to what they do get. Again, excuse me for being critical, but if you look at the DCMS standards that they put out last week, just read the language; it says, "You will by next Thursday have 5000 visitors a week." It is not in the language of saying, "We understand you have a problem, these are the things that might help you sort it out, this is the way you might approach your budget, we will come and talk to you." It is given out as an imperial edict as to what needs to be done. The last lot did not work and nor will this lot. The whole management style is wrong.

Q27 Alan Keen: Can I put one last point to you, and you may be giving some solutions to it. Just to illustrate one of the problems, a few years ago - before 1997 - Hounslow Council wanted to save money and they were talking about the rumours that the library hours were going to be reduced. So there was a series of meetings throughout the borough. I attended one meeting in Feltham, my own constituency, with about 25 people in the scout hut. Another centre on an estate still in my constituency delivered eight people at a public meeting. The other meeting I attended in Chiswick, which is outside my constituency - and it was before my wife was elected so I dared go down that meeting - and if I ask you to guess the figures you will obviously guess, and 300 people were there and they could not all get in the room. So the people in Feltham were not even aware of what they would be losing if there were cuts, but the people in Chiswick were very, very aware. You can probably say the reason my wife was not elected in '92 but she was in '97 was that it was a harder seat to win and therefore it was more middle class and the middle class did not move over to vote labour en masse until '97. So how do we serve people of Feltham who do not even see the value of libraries? It is not their fault, but how do we get over that? Tower Hamlets is a great example, is it not?

Ms Wills: If I can respond very quickly to that? We very much recognise that if we had increased our opening hours, produced wonderful buildings, even put them on the High Street and put all these great books in them, and it still had "Library" on the door and it looked to the outside world the same, we probably would not have achieved the significant results that we have. What we have done is very directly and deliberately gone out to learn from retail about modern branding techniques, modern marketing and communication techniques, to go out there and to communicate to people, and to say, "You may have had all those perceptions in the past but that is not what we are about; we are about providing modern, accessible, relevant services which are fun and enjoyable and places where you want to be." People come into our building because they think, "What is this? This looks interesting, this looks like a nice place to be. Oh, is it a library? Oh, right." That is great. I do not care if they do not know what they are coming into, but the point is they come over the threshold because it is welcoming, it is accessible, bright and colourful, and then they come and use the services.

Alan Keen: I had better stop there, Chairman, because we could go on and on.

Q28 Mr Doran: I am interested in the political dimension of all of this because you are all coming from different perspectives, but at the end of the day you are saying the same thing. If I could summarise my interpretation of what you are saying, it is that there is no co-ordinated government approach and when you have a mixture of government plus the endless numbers of local authorities we have in the country, then you are left with what can be best described as a patchwork of provision. How do you deal with that? One of the things that I am conscious of, as a politician, is who is lobbying me? I do not think I have ever been lobbied by anyone about the quality of libraries in this country, or even in my own constituency, which is Aberdeen, in the North of Scotland, where we have a fairly good provision of libraries and a Presbyterian ethos of what libraries are for, but they are pretty dull places? Who are the advocates, who are the people who are going to come and sell this to us as politicians?

Mr Holden: I hope us to a certain degree! You are right, I think there is a gap; that that advocacy at local, regional and national level is not well developed and is not developed enough. I just do not hear those voices either.

Q29 Mr Doran: But where are they gong to come from?

Mr Coates: From a myriad of agencies. If you look at Framework For The Future or the Action Plan document that comes after it, there is a list of stakeholders for libraries and then we have all kinds of initials - CILIP and SCL and all the rest of it. None of those lists, incidentally, includes the general public, who are not only the stakeholders who pay but also the stakeholders who use it. If you look down that list there are so many agencies, but all they ever ask for is more money. They do not say, "We could do this, we could that, this is what we are here to do," all they ever say is - and I have seen a statement from CILIP yesterday, who is the main agency - saying, "The problem is we just need more money," and it is so disappointing because it is within their hands; they have tremendous ability to influence how local authorities operate their service and they do not. They do not act with responsibility; they act with self-interest. I am an advocate and it is very dispiriting to find the way senior people respond, to be truthful.

Q30 Mr Doran: Within the local authority networks, if local authorities were arguing for more money, for example, for libraries then we would be very well aware of it, but we are not. I am interested how you managed to get your Idea Store off the ground, just to sell the concept, because that must have been difficult and there must have been money involved in that and finding the correct property. There was a complete sea change in ideas; how did you manage that?

Ms Wills: It was about having a vision and it was about recognising the need for change and recognising the need for radical change. When the council adopted the strategy to move from its existing libraries and Adult Education Centres network to a network of seven Idea Stores it was about saying, "These things are going to change radically," recognising that capital investment would be needed, and that included going outside and looking for external investment and external funding to a very great extent, but was also upfront about recognising that increased investment in longer opening hours and an improved book stock would be there from the beginning, and recognising that if you are opening these buildings longer then they need more maintenance and more investment than was there before. So what we are doing is working more efficiently by combining two services, the Adult Education Service and the library service, achieving economies of scale there and driving unit costs down significantly. The crucial thing was that the council recognised the contribution that these Idea Stores could make to the learning agenda, to the regeneration and the social inclusion agenda in an extremely diverse borough and one that scores regularly on the indices of deprivation.

Q31 Mr Doran: When did the light flash on? How did you present it to them?

Ms Wills: It was presented as a strategy borne out of significant market research. Officers went out and engaged high quality market research, a programme went out ---

Q32 Mr Doran: How did you persuade them to spend that money?

Ms Wills: As Tim suggested, if there is a determination money can be found to do quality market research to start off the process and it was the initiative of a few key individuals to say, "We have to do things differently but we need quality information to inform us as to how we should do things differently." One in ten households in the borough responded one way or another to say, "This is what we want with our new service," and then it was up to officers to go away and say, "Right, this is how we do it, can we have your permission, members, for this new vision? - Yes - Great, now we will go out and raise the money."

Q33 Mr Doran: You have the project there, delivered the service being enjoyed and used by the community. Are other libraries or other authorities interested? Are you getting a lot of visitors, are you spending a lot of time selling this idea to other people?

Ms Wills: A huge amount of interest in the UK and internationally, I have to say. There are many other authorities who are looking at it or looking at angles of it. There are examples in other places, for example the Discovery Centres in Kent and Hampshire; there are new library buildings being built that are learning from elements of that. Nobody is doing the whole package of what we are doing, but certainly it has a huge amount of interest and people are looking to learn the lessons.

Q34 Mr Doran: I am taking a step at a time. So who is now selling this idea to ODPM and DCMS that this is a road down which the libraries should go?

Ms Wills: The Idea Store strategy does appear as one of the exemplars of best practice in the framework for the future document by DCMS. So we have had constructive dialogues with DCMS since the very early stages of the strategy. The trick for us is to do that and have dialogue with DFES around how we can make people aware of the contribution we can make to the learning agenda and ODPM particularly around the regeneration agenda, and social inclusion agenda we are looking at the Cabinet Office. It is how many angles can we talk to and there is a real difficulty of getting out of one silo and into the next because libraries are one of the few truly joined up services that hit so many agendas, but when we try to talk upwards it is very difficult to get people to recognise them.

Q35 Mr Doran: It would make your job much easier if government could pull all these services together and give you a one-stop shop?
Ms Wills: Yes.

Q36 Mr Doran: Presumably the DWP would be in there as well? Are they part of the package?

Ms Wills: We have a very good relationship locally with Job Centre Plus and they provide advice and service in the stores, yes.

Q37 Chairman: A couple of questions relating to the place of libraries and the administration of libraries. Libraries can occupy a great symbolic place in urban life as well as in rural life. For example, if you have seen the disaster move The Day After Tomorrow, the great climax is in the New York Public Library, and that is because everybody, certainly in the States, knows about the New York Public Library. That being so, is one of the problems for libraries that because of the expectations of them they are spreading themselves too thin? Derek talked, for example, about people's need to know about their housing benefit and various things like that, and there is no doubt that people do need to know about it. But with the establishment of government funding online centres in many places - I have already, I am happy to say, several in my own constituency - all with very great computer facilities in the schools, which perhaps ought to be opened up to the general public out of school hours, would that kind of access to information not be better done in a different way so that libraries can concentrate more, with their limited funding, on their core activities? Again, there is a problem there, is there not? When I was a teenager I went to Sheepscar Library in Leeds, or if I needed a bigger collection I went to the Central Library in Leeds, and basically what they had were great swathes of books, a newspaper room which in those days was mainly used by unemployed people to keep warm and, in the case of the Central Library, a Reference Library. The ethos then grew up that they had to do other things. You had a record library, and now of course we have spread to CDs, videos, DVDs, the lot. Ought there to be some kind of definition of what a library should adhere to so that librarians, many of whom are brilliant, can concentrate on the job which libraries were originally founded to do, without too stringent limits? They do wonderful things. For example, Gorton Library in my constituency has, in the past at any rate, made a practice during the Booker period of having the Booker shortlist available in a special section so that people can read them. So the first question I would like to ask you is about the definition of library and whether there ought to be some way of defining what a library does so that with their limited funds they do not spread themselves too thinly?

Ms McKearney: Absolutely. For me, coming from a marketing background, part of the problem has been about trying to do all things for all people, and if there were a clearer definition of particular outcomes for particular audiences, and libraries' role in achieving that outcome were clearly defined and expected, then you could be much clearer with the public about what they could expect from their library. One of the things that they could expect is if they were a parent their child would be supported in early years' language development and reading when they were under five, and then supported around the reading for pleasure elements when schools were shut. That would be a very powerful role for libraries to be playing, and this kind of thinking - the jargon is "national offer" - is very much around at the moment in the planning systems around the framework for the future. What is it that libraries can uniquely offer to the nation that we need to create the kind of society that we need that nobody else can? And to which groups of people? Should that be the definition of what their main purpose is?

Mr Holden: For me the definition does not come from us or anyone else, really, stating what libraries ought to do; it comes more from what the public values in libraries. Libraries are not just physical spaces they are psychological spaces and if someone from the public feels comfortable engaging with the Employment Service in a library but not in a Job Centre then that is a reason to have things in the library which other libraries might not have. Just as in Tim's world of bookselling; booksellers are not in the business of selling coffee but they do it because that is what their customers want. We have to think in those kinds of terms in defining what a library does.

Mr Coates: A coffee shop does not make a bookshop a better bookshop.

Mr Holden: It is the experience of the person who is ----

Mr Coates: I do rather agree with what the Chairman said. You do not try to make a bad bookshop into a good one by putting a coffee shop in it. May I read from my submission? I think if we are going to correct the problem in libraries, which is very, very serious, we have really to understand that we have made some mistakes and that there are real problems. "There has been a fundamental error of approach over the past twenty years wherein the assumption has been made that in order to increase their appeal and use, libraries should diversify. The effect of this has been to reduce the quality of reading material and information on offer and, consequently, the reputation of the service to the public, particularly to new generations of readers. Greengrocers do not improve or modernise by selling ice cream just because they perceive that is what children like to eat. The service should have modernised ... not diversified". Modernisation means improving the ranges and the collections of books that are available to the public; it means better access to information, which is why computers are an important part - I think that is the reason they are there, it is not so that people can play games on them - more agreeable buildings (which, obviously, is right as everybody in the country knows - retailers and restaurants have improved in the last 20 years), more up-to-date service and behaviour by the library staff towards people, and longer opening hours. It does not mean changing the fundamental and core service that a library used to offer and still should. You are not out-of-date, sir. What you are saying should still be exactly the reason why a library is so useful to every little community in which it stands or every big city. The Manchester Central Library is a most fantastic place. However, the range of books in there is awful - it is just absolutely, plain dreadful. They are all old, they are tatty and it has got nothing of the last three years currently. I was there the other day and Waterstones opened down the road the most fantastic shop, and it just contrasted the two things. In one place the guy really believed in what he was doing and would not have allowed himself to be distracted even for sales of wrapping paper, I should not think, but in the library they would have sold anything just to kind of make an excuse to get someone through the door, it felt like. There is a wonderful collection of literature upstairs still, thank God; let us hope they do not take that away. The policy of diversification has been a catastrophe for libraries, and I believe we have got to recognise that and pull it back.

Mr Holden: I think there is a difference with fleshy add-ons that have no meaning to people. I agree with Tim totally, you do not make a bad bookshop into a good bookshop by putting a coffee shop there but if you find that is what your customers want and respond to and that is the only place they can go, then there is a reason for it being there because you are providing something of value.

Chairman: My other question is ministerial responsibility. The last time we conducted an inquiry we found that there was a real problem about where the locus on ministerial responsibility was. Clearly, we are conducting this inquiry because "Books R Us", and the Department of Culture, Media and Sport, clearly, has a role. However, the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister has a role because public libraries are run by local authorities (if we are dealing with income, certainly, they are run by local authorities); the Department for Education and Skills, obviously, has a very important role because books are educational too, and reading Harry Potter is education just as much as anything else. It is always difficult and I understand the problems the Prime Minister has in terms of structure of government, because we found this in terms of the media, for example, and broadcasting - the split between the Department of Trade of Industry and the Department of Culture, Media and Sport. Do you think that there might be, as it were, a definition from which we might consider recommending one of those three departments as the department with lead responsibility for libraries, so that everybody knows where they are?

Rosemary McKenna: You will also get local authorities who shift libraries between education and leisure services as the authority changes.

Q38 Chairman: And, also, of course, with devolution.

Ms Wills: I would just say that I think whichever one you put it into you would still have the issue of there being issues in the other departments and needing to break out of those silos and join up.

Mr Coates: I agree with that but I would caution against this thing about regionalisation. There is already enough confusion. Let us just say it stays with the DCMS. They have to make clear that they are not responsible for running libraries; they have to say "It is not our job; our job is to help you and work out what help you need", but not to pretend they are running it. Then it just completely falls between two stools. The MLA, which we have not talked about today, should be filling a lot of the roles we have been talking - about advocacy and so on - but just is not. To be honest, it just has not got the stature or the seniority and it has not realised its role is to help local authorities, I do not think. I think it keeps putting out statements about what shall be done. You have not heard Heather talk about what the MLA has done for her because they do not. Therefore, do not waste money on regional MLAs. We have just opened about six offices round the country but it is just another waste of money. MLAs are pretty near a waste of money, in my view, but what it needs is somebody acting with authority on behalf of the Minister, the Audit Commission and the ODPM as a sort of little board, operating to sort this problem out urgently and get rid of all the wretched agencies that are all over the place.

Q39 Rosemary McKenna: You mentioned the MLA and I was the chair in Scotland of the Libraries Information Council. We used to try and improve the situation. We persuaded the Government to give us money for pilot funding for grants for local authorities which they bid for. Does that not happen down here? They came to us with a project and if we thought it was good we grant-aided it and then used it as best practice to spread throughout Scotland, and it worked tremendously.

Ms McKearney: When we are talking to DfES about starting an innovation fund to encourage collaboration between school and public libraries, which is flimsy, that would be really exciting, I think. My take on it is where would they have the most political clout?

Q40 Rosemary McKenna: Local authorities have to compete for a grant, and on the basis of this is something that will really develop the service, you get really exciting bids coming in from the local authorities and it has paid tremendous dividends. One of the things that happened in my constituency was we made a bid with the local authority to put IT into sheltered housing complexes and it was the library service which ran it, and it is incredibly successful. The silver surfers, I think, were the first ones to be called that. That is just one example of the kind of thing that local authorities or library services can do, given a bit of incentive. There is nothing like that?

Mr Coates: There are tiny, little pockets. You guys will know better, but you hear of little projects where there is a little charitable fund or something, but nothing of any substance that would change a local authority's way of working.

Chairman: It is an interesting question whether, if they did not exist, we would actually found them today. They were a huge centre of life, were they not? Levenshulme Library, in my constituency, for example, is a Carnegie Library; it is a public library now but it has got a Carnegie foundation stone. Just to wind up, those of you who know the musical The Music Man know that one of the best songs in it is Marian the Librarian. Thank you very much. That was a very stimulating run round the course.