Suffolk “divestment” next year

Ian, a wee bit of research that might interest people and could maybe be used in campaigns – the idea of asking when a library authority’s budget was last at levels proposed by the cuts, and asking how many libraries they had at that point. If less then are being proposed for the cuts then people can quite rightly ask if they have managed the libraries in the past at proposed budget levels with more libraries, why not now. There are factors such as inflation, but there are also countering factors such as the drop in IT costs in the past decade (computers are much cheaper to buy nowadays).

In terms of England as a whole:

“if we speculate that the UK budget for libraries for 2011-12 will be 25% less than it was in 2010/11, then the answer is as follows. In 2010/11 we spent £1,093m. In 2000/1 we spent £791m, which is actually 27.8% less. At that time there were 4,600 libraries. If we believe the current projections, there will be about 4,000 at the end of 2010/11. Inflation in this field hasn’t been that much during the decade, in fact book prices have gone down slightly and IT prices have gone down by a lot.”
http://www.goodlibraryguide.com/blog/archives/2011/02/what_should_the.html#comments

My next question was when (what year) were levels of library service in England last below 4000. From a recent email to CILIP’s library and archives office:

“I did manage to find statistics going back to the base year of 1995-96 on LISU which seem to indicate a total of 5113 service points:

http://www.lboro.ac.uk/departments/dis/lisu/list97/publib97.html

It takes a bit of drilling down to find, but before this we at this point appear to be in the Dark Ages.

I’ve just had a thought, the 1964 Act laid down the standard that everyone with the exception of rural areas should live within 1 mile of a library[1]. Presumably there would then have been some research at that point into public library provision in England. There are a few reports mentioned in the second hearing to the Bill[2] – probably the place to start looking.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Where_It_Is_Mine/The_Modern_History_of_Public_Libraries_in_England
[2] http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/lords/1964/jun/30/public-libraries-and-museums-bill “

My best theory at this point is to say that the last major library building period was the 60s, so perhaps this was the point at which libraries first rose above 4000.

In other words, there is a question as to whether the current Conservative Government has taken the libraries back to where it was in the 1960s. 50 years of progress wiped out in a year – and people are asking is it ideological? Authorities have actually in the past maintained more libraries at the same budget levels.

I’ve asked http://falseeconomy.org.uk/ to look at the issue, quoting:

“Can I ask you to do some analysis on the comments in this post from Public Library News:

http://publiclibrariesnews.blogspot.com/2011/02/521-libraries-460-buildings-and-61.html#comments

The thesis is along the lines that the last time library budgets were at the levels of the current budget cuts was about 2001 – yet we had roughly the same number of libraries – if authorities in the past have managed roughly the same number of libraries on the same levels of the budget cuts, why do they now have to close libraries?

The same principle could be applied to other council services, what levels were there of service the last time the budget was at the level of the current cuts, and what levels of service are being proposed now — if there is any difference what exactly is the justification given by the council, can it be justified, or are we looking at an argument that says look, are these reductions in service ideological.”