Libraries and the Council budget

This post is a personal view from Cllr Andrew Marshall.

I fully understand local people’s frustrations about the threats to our library service – as a councillor I voted in 2000 to keep the three threatened libraries open.
In terms of the possibility of community groups running libraries, we certainly all need to understand as much as possible and as soon as possible about the feasibility of this.

But in terms of how much taxpayers’ money we can afford to go into Camden’s libraries in future, I can’t help feeling that CPLUG and others are perhaps focused to some extent on the wrong things. There’s simply no point in looking at the libraries budget in isolation, rather than at the council budget as a whole. Since councils of all political hues – from Conservative-run Hammersmith & Fulham to Labour-LibDem-run Wirral – are closing libraries, it is surely unlikely that there some unique problem in the management of Camden libraries that can be uncovered as the answer to our prayers. Issues like whether fines are being paid of course have their place, but are simply not central in the context of the scale of the council’s budget.

I really urge everyone such as CPLUG with a keen interest in local services to read the budget papers that went to the council cabinet at the beginning of December, in order to get a sense of the scale of the challenge and the breadth and depth of the cuts in areas such as elderly services, child social work and voluntary sector funding.

The idea has been floated that cuts might not have to made in 2013/4 as the economic situation might have changed and the council tax could be raised. I’m afraid if you read the council budget papers it’s pretty clear how far from reality this view is. Britain has a huge structural deficit – it needs economic growth first and foremost to help repay it. You can’t spend the same money twice. Moreover the scale of council tax increase needed would be in my view completely unacceptable to local residents, many on fixed incomes – the leverage inherent in the current local government finance system does not make this at all feasible, even if desired.

I was struck in November that one member of the Heath Library friends group committee told the Ham and High:
“I’ve been told the amount spent on libraries in general is minimal compared to what is spent in other areas. Is it worth the small saving for such a huge upset?”

Well, the council budget is publicly available, so she and others can easily see whether libraries spending is indeed minimal. As for the huge upset, virtually every area where there will be cuts is seeing a huge upset. The point is that if you need to make cuts on this scale, you need to make savings virtually everywhere. You can’t afford to ringfence much from savings, since that just requires even greater savings elsewhere. I’ve not heard either local groups or the local media coming up with any other significant alternative savings – I don’t necessarily expect them to, but it’s important to grasp the context in which councillors are setting the budget as a whole. And while of course there is always scope for further efficiencies, it’s simply not credible to think that £86m can be found in this way.

I profoundly wish that Britain – and thus our local authorities – was not in the fiscal position it is in. But it is.