Is the community supported clause essentially saying that Ed Vaizey does not mind if volunteers carry out statutory (or whatever the libraries are nowadays) local authority work?

What are appropriate circumstances and what counts as careful analysis? This leaves the door wide open to interpretation and challenge, taking us no further forward. Legal challenges may be encouraged by this statement.

Lee Godfrey
Surrey Libraries Action Movement (SLAM)

I’m not sure of how much our public libraries currently cost the tax payer (considerably less after the cuts, approx. £20 a year I would guess), but they are very good value for money, raising the culture (“ideas and activities”) of communities, adding value to housing, etc.

“Annette Brooke: To ask the Secretary of State for Culture, Olympics, Media and Sport what steps he plans to take to ensure that the provisions of the Public Libraries and Museum Act 1964 are applied consistently nationwide; and what steps he plans to take to ensure proposed new community managed libraries remain part of the statutory service. [89530]”

To put this into context and the reason for the question no doubt, prior to the 1964 Act local authority library provision was optional and as a consequence library provision varied greatly in quality across the country, the Act made it mandatory, furthermore following a process that involved several committee reports and over more than 5 years, a minimum standard was set for the provision of that library service ensuring that the public could expect a minimum quality of service from their council (after all if libraries were to be made mandatory, if local authorities did dot have to provide a minimum standard of service they could at least in theory have continued to provide a very low quality service, rendering the Act little more than flotsam). The aim of the Act was very much to provide a minimum quality of library service across the country, as can be quite clearly seen in the second reading of the Act.

Ed Vaizey has probably been advised and this advice cascaded down to the chairs of local authority cabinets responsible for libraries that the Standards were “dropped” by the previous Government.

While it appears this did happen in 2007 (even though we seem to have no more than a tweet as the last and sole remaining artefact from this episode in the history of libraries):

i) it would manifestly (IMHO at least, I have not been able to read as comprehensively as I would like on the subject) have been an abuse of power, the DCMS had a remit to evolve library policy (one of the three parts to the Act), but not to drop the Standards, this could only have been done as part of an amendment to the Act, and

ii) even if the DCMS did find a legal loophole to climb through in order to do this, it surely can be classed as an abuse of democracy, and the loophole duly closed.

To say there are now no definition of comprehensive and efficient (a Judge has I believed ruled that it is for the DCMS to define these terms) to me seems to be saying that some of the wording of an act of Parliament is no more than flotsam, there for historical reasons – is this not bringing Parliament and our legal system into disrepute?

EV’s reference to assessment of needs I think is drawn from the Wirral inquiry, but all this is is a reference to process (the question is ‘needs’ to do what? Towards what objective is the assessment of needs inorder to meet that end being the salient question; the objective of the 1964 Act was an efficient library service, this can be quite easily demonstrated, and it was the standards attached to the Act that defined the starting point for what was considered an efficient service, the DCMS had a remit that recognised these would evolve, but the Standards as a component of the Act could never be removed – not until the day that the library service was perhaps judged not needed).

EV is I think basically shirking saying that he has reasoned that local authorities simply no longer have to provide a minimum quality library service (hence the wording of Annette Brooke’s question), this being through essentially the ‘slight of hand’ of the removal of the Standards, and that he has no intention of discussing the validity of their removal – it suits his ends now, and the Parliamentary Ombudsman has not as yet approached him regarding the matter (the subject btw is Constitutional & Administrative Legislation, DDC 342.06).