Comments on: It figures? A look at the real spending on English public libraries 2007/12

By: englisch

englisch — Sun, 17 Mar 2013 08:20:44 +0000

The speech avoided all mention of anything and then claimed that, therefore, nothing was happening. The first part of the speech took this line about it and then the second – more relevant to the purposes of this homepage – took the same line about libraries

By: Stuart Fitzgerald

Stuart Fitzgerald — Wed, 13 Mar 2013 12:45:03 +0000

That’s spot on, Martyn and Trevor!
….. Whereas a sensible piece of logic would suggest that if the frontline services are cut, there is far less of an organisation to administer from the back office – ergo, savings should automatically be accruable there too. THAT is how common-sense would operate and how a private sector business would think and behave – in ANY sector.
Now in the case of library services, as opposed to cutting hours, branches, professionals and other staff, one could just as easily reduce a wide range of back office support functions and invariably save much more money to enable the council to keep the branches open and keep contributing to all the corporate objectives it sets itself eg educational attainment, employability and cultural development etc but that would mean spreading the coprorate costs more thickly across much bigger and higher-spending departments – which in itself would make a lot of sense. But one of the risks of doing that is that it would upset senior management and senior Cabinet colleagues in “more powerful” depts such as Social Services, Housing and Education – and THAT, in many cases is where the problem lies….CXs and Leaders don’t want to upset their strongest internal allies and so pick on the quieter, meeker, low-hanging fruit type services where spending is actually quite peripheral to the big picture.

It’s almost an analogy, in microcosm, for the national debate about whether the Defence budget can grow at the expense of the welfare budget – i.e. ludicrous!

Hvaing said that, and having worked extensively with Oxfordshire CC to explore potential savings within its library service (I know exactly where their over-spending issues lie!), we must be careful NOT to generalise – some councils are indeed offering up proportionate cuts in their back office budgets along with the existing library service budgets to ease the transition to alternative governance methods – eg partnering with specialist commercial providers or Trusts or mutuals. As well as criticising those councils that won’t do that, we must also praise those few that have, and will do it in the future. And remember the reason they’ll do it – simply because it makes good business sense!

By: Trevor Craig

Trevor Craig — Tue, 12 Mar 2013 19:35:44 +0000

In reply to Martyn Everett.

Thanks Martyn,

It think it would be fair to say then that the pain isn’t being shared equally if the percentage of the central recharge costs are increasing at such a rate.

If you deliver less front line services the back office admin workload should be decreasing as they have less to do, or at least that’s how it should be working.

By: Martyn Everett

Martyn Everett — Tue, 12 Mar 2013 08:16:46 +0000

In reply to Trevor Craig.

The reason why this happens is because the cuts are made to particular services, but not to central administration. Consequently a larger amount has to be taken out of the remaining budgets in order to fund central administration.

A highly simplified example:
If you have five service budgets of £100 (a total of £500) and deduct £100 in central admin costs, each individual budget has £20 deducted (20%)
if you then cut one service so that you have only four service budgets of £100 each, in order to pay the central admin cost each service has £25 deducted (25%).

This basic principle underlies what is happening, although it is concealed by all the other factors eg inflation, uneven application of cuts, growth in central admin etc. to deal with redundancy, uneven distribution of budgets across departments.

By: Trevor Craig

Trevor Craig — Mon, 11 Mar 2013 21:06:28 +0000

This always perplexes me, during a time of undoubtedly large cuts to library budgets I never understand how these charges can be so big. In fact in Oxfordshire the other expenditure estimate has gone up from £3,100,144.00 in 2010/2011 to £4,410,636.00 in 2012/2013, a increase of £1,310,492.00 in one year. This is in the context of my local council cutting the staffing budget in 21 of the smaller libraries by 313k cutting the low paid library assistants and managers and the libraries in the hard to reach rural areas, that despite what you read about the cotswolds and the chipping norton set does have a lot of poor, vunerable and elderly residents. I post I wrote a while ago which upset lots of councillors because I calculated the back office would end up bigger than the front line and this prompted the one of the senior managers to send me a break down of these back office costs:
https://docs.google.com/file/d/1vQcbFhmNGe45WQ1z8xX2GmRkDBBx2KM2ZcBdcKlqURLIa3ipXHjgGG71bTSc/edit

He never questioned my figures I think, its just we disagree on back office. I never said certain roles weren’t required I just say that if you’re not a customer facing employee by definition you are in the back office. Anyway, I don’t know if other councils assign their costs in the same way, the CIPFA instructions seem quite clear.

I have FOI’ed to ask for a similar breakdown to the above for to try and explain why the costs have jump in this last year for OCC.

By: Stuart Fitzgerald

Stuart Fitzgerald — Mon, 11 Mar 2013 09:36:38 +0000

This is helpful analysis from the ever-independent Mr Coates. In particular the corporate recharges issue always warrants some detailed unpicking with councils often failing to accept that if the libraries and staff are on the verge of closure, they won’t be able to allocate those charges to libraries anyway! However …. please beware…. maybe not all is as it seems …

…. Some cautionary queries re CIPFA library stats …..
1. Are the spend figures shown therein ever/always accurate?
2. Do they ever/always match the libraries budget figures given to Members, local people and/or in tender documents?
3. Are they ever/always compiled/submitted by an independent financial auditor or accountant?
4. Has there ever/always been something of a conflict of interests in officers charged with the responsibility of voluntarily compiling or submitting these figures not wanting their services to be seen to be comparatively more costly than others?
5. Has there been a fall-off in councils voluntarily submitting their spend data since 2009/10?

if the answer to all, any one, or part of these questions is NO…. then please treat these figures with real caution.

By: Martyn Everett

Martyn Everett — Mon, 11 Mar 2013 00:09:55 +0000

While I’m not sure how to construct indicators for library inflation, I do recall back in the days when LISU still published a comprehensive breakdown of library costs, that one factor creating pressure on library budgets was continually increasing property costs – and in spite of the recession and its twin. austerity, rents and property costs are still rising. While some library costs may not be rising at the same rate as the CPI, it is quite possible that other costs are rising at a faster rate.