Alan Gibbons’ Blog

MEDIA STATEMENT FROM WIRRAL COUNCIL

Thursday 23 April 2009

Re: Wirral Library Service

Leader of Wirral Council, Councillor Steve Foulkes said:

 “The Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport has ordered a public inquiry into the decision. I cannot comment on the inquiry itself because I have not yet seen a statement of the grounds for that inquiry.

However, we welcome the inquiry in principle because at the heart of this issue  is a debate about the best way to protect the future of this nation’s libraries, their place in our communities and the function we want the libraries of the future to deliver. From our perspective, the message on this issue from the Museums, Libraries and Archive Council has been somewhat mixed.

There is also a wider debate about the autonomy of local government to manage within its own resources, and about how much the government or the council tax payer is prepared to pay, in a time of very tight resources, for their library service in the face of competing and growing demands from other areas, including rising costs of child protection, rising costs of care for the elderly, rising costs of education and the need to protect the local economy in a time of recession.

ENDS

Background

Wirral recently decided to invest £20m in relocating its library service from 24 buildings to 13 buildings in strategic, easy to access locations across the borough, the majority of which will be multi-purpose buildings, either modernised or new built.

These buildings will house a number of other council services. Where possible they will share space or provide space for other public sector bodies and, in addition to providing traditional library facilities, they will also provide community space and free access for the public to IT.

This is part of a wider agenda to reduce the number of buildings owned by the council, to contribute to reducing the Council’s carbon footprint by making the buildings owned by the Council as energy efficient as possible, and to save money for the council tax payer by reducing staffing and overhead costs. This wider agenda is familiar to Central government, who have been encouraging local authorities to save money in this way and who are seeking to follow it themselves.

At the end of the process, 99% of Wirral residents will still be within two miles of their nearest library and the number of remaining buildings will be similar to those of other authorities Wirral’s size. Our aim is to create a first class library service in key, well used locations which will be modern, inviting, community friendly and capable of adapting to technology changes of the future.

Nationally, the number of books loaned from libraries has dropped considerably over the last ten years. Loans of music and DVDs have dropped dramatically following the availability of downloads from the internet or cheaper outlets. The way people access information is changing. The first case of book piracy on the net has just been taken, and the creation of electronic book readers must surely be followed in time by the ability to download books as easily as music is downloaded now. Small, stand alone buildings, however community oriented they may be, will be more vulnerable to this kind of change in the future than larger, multi use buildings with lower overall costs and a greater ability to adapt.

Local communities are fiercely protective of their libraries and Wirral’s decision, which was not taken lightly, has created a high level of protest, fed by local politics, which spread rapidly through the use of social networking sites and other blogs, attracting national and even international protest, taking the issue well beyond the boundaries of the council tax payers who will be directly affected.

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 23rd, 2009 at 7:17 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.