Transforming Brent Libraries

James Powney

Description

Public libraries continue to be an important and much loved public service. There are almost 3,000 public libraries in England run by 150 different authorities and spending about £800 million of public money. Almost half the population hold a library card . Why then is so little attention paid to how and why a public library service should be modernised?
The transformation of Brent libraries was a successful example of public service reform leading to improved outcomes despite a drop in budgets of almost 20%. As such it has been praised by staff in other authorities as well as in government literature .
Yet it was extraordinarily controversial. It generated a judicial review fought all the way to the Court of Appeal, attracting condemnation from a number of celebrities and national headlines.
James Powney was at the heart of this successful library reform to turn a mediocre public library service into one of the most successful services in the UK.
This book is arranged in four sections. The first is a description of getting the process passed, and through the subsequent Court proceedings. The second tackles some of the themes that came up in that process, in particular the failure of the “Big Society” to take off. The third is about what modern libraries can do and why they are important, contrary to what some people in the government argue. Finally, there is a short list of the lessons. learnt.

Sujets

• Information Science
• Disciplines
• Language Arts
• Libraries
• Library

Informations

• Publié par: AuthorHouse UK
• Date de parution: 23 octobre 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781728375533
• Langue: English

Extrait

Transforming BRENT LIBRARIES








JAMES POWNEY










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© 2022 James Powney. All rights reserved.

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Published by AuthorHouse 10/20/2022

ISBN: 978-1-7283-7552-6 (sc)
ISBN: 978-1-7283-7553-3 (e)






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To My Parents



About the Author
Elected as a Labour councillor in 2006 the author, James Powney, was the Lead Member for Environment and Neighbourhood Services in the London Borough of Brent. He oversaw the successful transformation of Brent Library service in raising both the total number of loans and visitors to become one of the most successful public library services in the UK. This is his first book.



Contents
Foreword
Acknowledgements

I The Transformation
II Themes
III Why are Libraries Important?
IV Lessons

Appendix: What the Libraries Transformation Actually Consisted Of



Foreword
Public libraries continue to be an important and much loved public service. There are almost 3,000 public libraries in England run by 150 different authorities and spending about £800 million of public money. Almost half the population hold a library card 1 . Why then is so little attention paid to how and why a public library service should be modernised?
The transformation of Brent libraries was a successful example of public service reform leading to improved outcomes despite a drop in budgets of almost 20%. As such it has been praised by staff in other authorities as well as in government literature 2 .
Yet it was extraordinarily controversial. It generated a judicial review fought all the way to the Court of Appeal, attracting condemnation from a number of celebrities and national headlines.
Quite a lot for one North London Borough.
This book is arranged in four sections. The first is a description of getting the process passed, and through the subsequent Court proceedings. The second tackles some of the themes that came up in that process, in particular the failure of the “Big Soci ety” to take off. The third is about what modern libraries can do and why they are important, contrary to what some people in the government argue. Finally, I draw up a short list of the lessons learnt.


1 Public Libraries, the Case for Support (2019 CILIP Re port)

2 CIFPA Statistics and the Future of England’s Libraries, Joan O’Bryan 2018 (pag e 21)



Acknowledgements
In writing this book, I should acknowledge some debts, possibly including the Friends of Kensal Rise Library (FKRL) who through sheer determination and litigiousness stretched the whole saga out to make enough material for a book. I am also particularly in debt to Tim Daniel and Ann Reeder, who helped review it for me and suggested improvements. I would also like to thank the users and staff of Brent library services for making it what it is. Any errors or faults remain my responsibility.



I
The Transformation
On 11 April 2011, I found myself in the middle of a baying mob. The person they were shouting at was me.
This was because I was speaking at a Brent Council meeting in favour of reforms to Brent’s library service that were to result in a substantial rise in users and loans by reducing the number of buildings used and extending the quantity and quality of service from the Borough’s libraries. It was the equivalent of a twitter pile on in real life and part of a campaign lasting several years to firstly intimidate the Council from backing down on its reforms, then trying to wreck any financial savings to the taxpayer and then to force the owners of one of the properties into handing over their building to the campaigners for free.
It involved an expensive High Court Action which the litigants lost comprehensively followed by more attempts to stretch out the whole debate by a series of manoeuvres through further larger hopeless legal appeals, attempts to use the planning system to block developments at one site in particular, and attempts to denigrate all Brent library activities in order to deny the success of the policy.
The whole thing was principally led by a small number of single issue campaigners, many of whom were not from the area, and various more politically orientated people often from fringe ideologies, as well as a few individuals who might best be characterised as odd.
During the controversy the then fashionable idea of “Big Society” solutions was tested to destruction, and it was demonstrated that in the right circumstances public services could be improved at lower cost to the tax payer. For central government it also functioned as a convenient distraction which “devolved the axe” in Francis Maude’s phrase.
The Axe Falls Locally
The onset of “austerity” and the severe budget cuts that followed may need recounting. Arguably, it was not so much a necessity as a policy choice by an incoming Tory/Liberal Democrat coalition that was inclined that way anyway. There is a plausible case that the way and the speed with which budgets were cut was actually damaging to the budget and to debt reduction.
In local government it was immediately clear that Eric Pickles had decided he wanted local government to be in the forefront of budget cutting. Part of this may have been a prejudice by government ministers that saw local government as inefficient, although local government has good claims to be one of the most efficient parts of the public sector. I suspect another part was designed to create turmoil in local services as a useful distraction from what was going on in central government. This was certainly in line with the message trailed by Tory sympathising stooges like Toby Young 3 .
This is because Eric Pickles, who was himself a Local Authority leader in the 1980s, saw places like Brent (which in 2010 had just elected a new Labour administration after four years of Tory/Liberal Democrat rule) as a potential base from which the Labour Party could rebuild. Giving such authorities a hard time avoided them being able to serve as a platform to attack the government. Hence not only were the cuts borne especially by local authorities, but Labour authorities in particular were targeted. Given the distribution of political support, this meant poorer areas suffering particularly badly from financial cuts.
Where Brent and other local authorities erred was in assuming that the cuts era would last only four years, when it has carried on continuously since 2010 to the moment I write this in 2022 despite the increasing prospect of local services simply collapsing from the combination of growing demand and diminishing capacity.
In Brent the first cut came just after the May 2010 General Election, when the new Chancellor George Osborne published an “emergency” budget that cut back budgets even in the financial year that was still only part way through. I don’t think there was any need to do this, it was simply a gesture to hammer home to the voters the narrative of a spendthrift Labour government. Little did any of us yet realise what a genuinely spendthrift government under Boris Johnson would look like years later.
Brent Labour therefore devised a strategy to deal with a presumed four years where local services would face unprecedented cuts.
The strategy was to cut back on things the Council didn’t need to do all together, to increase efficiency through transforming services (for instance moving from landfill disposal to recycling disposal for waste as much as possible, raising revenues as much as possible and making better use of assets. Sadly, even in 2010, some of the Labour councillors and some of the siren voices that they listened to (often outside the Party itself) didn’t grasp these concepts and just had a simplistic “more money good; less money bad approach”. The Libraries Transformation Project was devised with making genuine improvements to public services despite a reduced budget in mind.
This meant offsetting the cut in the budget by longer opening hours, better IT, better bookstock at each library, better buildings with proper disabled access and more events. Since the buildings would be newer, it would be easier to keep them in good repair, and their greater size would make them more flexible to changing needs (“futureproofing” in the approved jargon).
In the Beginning
Given my centrality to defending the proposals it is ironic that my first response was to reject them out of hand. This was because I feared that the whole business would distract from the (to me) more pressing issue of climate change where our manifesto had ambitious targets to cut carbon emissions and increase recycling.
In the end it has been suggested to me that they actually helped us to implement our ambitious recycling policies since the energy o