The following is an edited version of the speech given by Libraries Connected President Ed Jewell to the LgiU Summit in July 2024. 

'Libraries Connected is the membership body for public library services in England, Wales, Northern Ireland and the Crown Dependencies. As well as providing practical support, training and advice to libraries, we represent them to government and help raise their profile in the media.

Working closely with heads of library services in authorities who have served Section 114 notices, we understand the severe financial constraints that Councils are under and were invited today as libraries have become something of a ‘canary in the mine’ when it comes to experiencing the challenges funding pressures can bring.

Under the Public Libraries and Museums Act 1964, local authorities have a statutory duty to provide a ‘comprehensive and efficient library service for all those who live, work or study within their area’. Despite this, libraries have been on the frontline of austerity for 14 years. Since 2009 we have seen funding for libraries drop nationally from £1.5 billion to £761.6 million and hundreds of public libraries close. 

To a degree, libraries have innovated their way through successive waves of funding reviews.  The introduction of self-service units, the growth in volunteer supported services and the increasing number of authorities using Open Plus technology to extend unstaffed opening hours have all helped libraries navigate funding pressures.

We need to be realistic, though. We have been innovating in the face of adversity. As one head of service said to me, ‘what business would for fourteen consecutive years cut the funding that supports its products, its staff and its opening hours and still expect to grow and flourish’? While library closures often attract public protest; reductions in resource funds, staffing and opening hours are less visible, though equally damaging. After 14 years of cuts, I’d suggest British public libraries are more like the proverbial frog in boiling water, than the canary in the mine.
 

The value of an engaged and integrated public library offer

One thing we need to be clear about is what our public libraries are for. There is a constant danger of focusing on form over function. Every time I write online about the amazing work our libraries do, someone will invariably reply, ‘But what about the books’? I’m passionate about libraries because I see them as free, welcoming, accessible and shared civic spaces that inspire lifelong learning, support health and wellbeing and enrich our economic and cultural lives. Lending books is one way, and a key way, we achieve that, but to suggest it is all libraries should do is like insisting you can only listen to music on vinyl or travel by horse and cart. It is a nostalgic trap that fails to realise the genuine purpose and potential of our public libraries.

Last month we published a set of election asks that sought to highlight the impact public libraries can make through the combination of their resources, staff and physical networks. We believe that libraries play a pivotal role in supporting literacy, digital inclusion and in combating social isolation. This builds on the work public libraries across the British Isles have been doing to develop four shared universal offers that boost Culture & Creativity, Health & Wellbeing, Information & Digital and Reading.

Libraries are delivering outstanding work across these offers, from Stoke on Trent’s 'Community Lounges' that underpin social prescribing; Haringey’s 'Digital Inclusion Service', which trains residents to access the internet for a wide range of health solutions, and Newham’s outstanding 'School Readiness Programme', helping to ensure parents are aware of the skills children need to succeed and to be independent at school.

Initiatives like these deliver authority-wide benefits, reducing demand on other services and helping to avoid more expensive and intensive interventions later in the day.  A recent study by the University of East Anglia estimated that a typical library in England generates £1m in value each year, equating to £6 of social value for every £1 of investment.

How Section 114 is impacting services

I can tell you now that the increasing pressures on Local Authority funding and the rising number of authorities declaring Section 114 status threatens to sweep all of this away.

There is a constant churn of employees, with previous long-standing contacts within the authority being lost and new relationships taking on a transient nature. One head of service described how in the last six months their service had moved between three different directorates. Capacity is being cut both within our library services and also in the other support services that they depend. The time of heads of service is increasingly committed to purely keeping services running, leaving no capacity to review service performance or forward plan service development.

Our members report previous solid partnerships and initiatives collapsing because the means to deliver them has gone. It was particularly disheartening to hear of cases where external grant funding had been secured by libraries to improve services, but they then struggled to deliver the projects because the capacity was no longer there to implement them.

On the frontline, library staff find they are dealing with increasingly frustrated customers, who feel their taxes have risen while service are taken away. Staff sickness has spiked and goodwill undermined as a whole.

We also hear of an increasing number of library authorities who are being caught in a financial version of the nostalgia trap.  The 1964 Public Libraries and Museums Act commits us to delivering a comprehensive and efficient service, provided through the ‘lending of books and other printed resources’.  An increasing number of local authorities are choosing to use this to define the limits of what their libraries should do, using language from 60 years ago to set out the scope and potential of our libraries in the 21st century.  

The future

All the colleagues I spoke to in preparation for today are acutely aware that this is a fundamental issue that spans well beyond libraries. The central grant to local government more than halved between 2010 and 2016. Tom Crewe recently noted in the London Review of Books:

Since local government is responsible for administering much of what we understand as the state – including schools and youth services; social care for children, the elderly and the disabled; refuges and child protection; social housing and housing benefit; bin collections, roads, buses, parks, cemeteries, public toilets and swimming pools, museums, galleries and libraries – while having limited ability to raise money for itself and being compelled to present a balanced budget, this (reduction) alone has had devastating effects.

As one head of service commented to me, ‘We can’t be in Section 114 forever. We need to collectively look at the bigger picture, we need bold, creative solutions that look beyond current arrangements and systems of working.’

Last month’s LGA White Paper on Local Government sets out a possible way forward.  A renewed partnership between local and national government; sufficient and sustainable funding; local government as a place leader, with a new focus on prevention and services for the wider community. 

Across the country public libraries are working to create services that are responsive to local community needs and to support activities that help people fulfil their full potential from early years to later in life. Let’s place our libraries at the centre of any new settlement, to inspire lifelong learning, support health and wellbeing and enrich our economic and cultural lives.'