Dear friends and colleagues,
I think there is one real truth here: namely, it is indeed vital to understand the business model and get the processes resolved before shot-gun betrothal of fundamentally incompatible services.
As with real marriages, the pre-nup stage is crucial. The MLA has evidence of examples of half-baked (half-hearted?) sharing, where costs either increase or no savings are made.
We also have examples where genuine integration delivers better and saves costs. These are the paradigm we need to advance.
The reason is that local authority funding and sustainability are THE major issue for 2011 and beyond; the scale of the challenge is immense (and largely invisible to the public to date). Scores of councils face the most extreme budgetary pressures and will be obliged to take extreme measures.
Anything other than the most original thinking will simply fail to deal with the problem; and many decent services (including library services) will collapse. Shared services, properly managed, are certainly one method of doing things differently, and more cost-effectively. The MLA flags others in our essay that was appended to our press release and that has been included in the DCMS consultation.
Against this background, I do not see truth (or wisdom) in the reactionary analysis of Trip Babbitt, who may never have had experience of managing public services in an era of very sharply declining budgets.
I hope this is a useful contribution to the debate about the important DCMS consultation.
Roy
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December 2nd, 2009 at 9:50 pm
Trip Babbit’s comments weren’t reactionary at all. He struck a wise note of caution against a band wagon that is increasing speed without any evidence of achievement (that I have seen presented) that urges co-location of services as a universal remedy.
And no one has yet had ‘experience of managing public services in an era of sharply declining budgets’–or not in the last 15 years. Fears of it happening exist - but not yet experience of what the responses need to be.
What is important is to make improvements in public libraries -their stock , their opening hours, the quality of the buildings and equipment and the knowledge of their front line staff. If co-location offers those possibilities in a particular case, then it is worth exploring. There are abundant savings to be found in the overheads and management costs without needing to cut costs or services on the front line. In fact these are places upon which more money needs to be spent.
Siting a library alongside a doctor’s surgery or in the premises of a school may well not add anything to the qualities of the library and could add to the expense. Trip Babbit’s views are intuitively correct.