Examination of Witnesses (Questions 1
- 19)
WEDNESDAY 17 NOVEMBER 2004
MS MIRANDA
MCKEARNEY,
MR JOHN
HOLDEN, MS
HEATHER WILLS
AND MR
TIM COATES
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 £1,000 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 clear outcomes
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 ago. 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% 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 well
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 £1,000 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 pieces of written evidence
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 administrative 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 the high
cost of replacement 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%.
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[14]
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 their role in encouraging reading
is about much more than lending books, it is about active intervention
at key life stages in a way that connects to policy and helps
build 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 the worth of that work
may not express itself 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 lever 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.
14 "Book Date" is the name of the agency
that provides standard bibliographic data to the publishing industry.
They were also formerly "British Books in Print". The
Service is not universal and electronic. Back
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