In Depth
Local hero?
03.08.07 Katherine Rushton
New culture minister Margaret Hodge has backed away from her right to seize control of failing libraries, saying that any use of her powers under the 1964 Public Libraries & Museums Act would be “short-sighted”.
Speaking to The Bookseller, Hodge indicated she would be unlikely to use the draconian powers and emphasised her support for local government control. “I think [to seize control] is short-sighted, I really do. If those powers had been used by the Thatcher government in the 1980s, they’d have forced me as a local governor to close my libraries. I would not want government to determine where there should be libraries. They’ve got to be locally accountable.”
Hodge knows the struggle between local management and national expectations first-hand. Unusually for an MP, she started her political career in local government, eventually becoming council leader for the London Borough of Islington for 10 years from 1982. One of the big issues then—as now—was protecting libraries from having their funding slashed in the face of wider budgetary cuts. “They were really under threat then because funding was extremely low,” she recalls. “I actually remember the district order coming in and telling us we were spending too much on libraries during rate-capping. Every time you look for cuts, because it’s a discretionary spend, it comes up as a potential cut.”
Hodge and a group of pro-library colleagues always resisted, partly because the potential savings were so small “in the grand total of local authority spending”. But she identifies the protection of library funding as one of the key challenges of her new role: “We are in a very tight fiscal environment and we’ve got to make sure that this jewel in our community offer is preserved. That’s danger one.”
The second danger is “ensuring that libraries maintain their relevance as people change”. Like her predecessor, David Lammy, Hodge sees libraries as a powerful tool for social inclusion and insists that they must be a “books-plus” facility to help draw as wide a crowd as possible. “You’ve got to start from what draws people to a library,” she says. “[It might be] hunting for a job, so you’ve got to have a terminal which gives them access to Jobcentre Plus. Bring somebody into a library and it will open their eyes to the other opportunities the library presents, but if you see yourself as being solely a traditional institution, I think you will be losing that opportunity to extend your reach. I do think books have to be at the heart of [libraries], but I also think that libraries have to encompass a much, much wider agenda.”
Is there a worry that by embracing other functions—from cafés to creches to t’ai chi—libraries will alienate traditional users? “No. Absolutely not,” Hodge says. “I think it’s more important that we ensure continuing relevance in people’s lives, and I think all of us here understand that.”
Hodge makes no bones about the fact that “there are huge issues which we need to address”, but claims to have been surprised by the buoyant state in which she has found the service. “My impression before I got to the statistics was that there were many more closures than there have been. That’s not to say that there hasn’t been the de-professionalisation of library staff and that purchasing budgets haven’t declined, but nonetheless it’s not that many. We’ve lost only about 30 or 40 libraries [net] over time.”
She is also relatively optimistic about the state of spending on books, which, according to the latest set of Chartered Institute of Public Finance & Accountancy figures, has fallen from 14.4% to 8.8% (£66m) of the total library budget in the past 10 years. “Yes, book stock is down,” she says, but “the purchasing [the number of books bought] is now going up again [by 4% in 2006 compared with 2005].” She is not about to make any moves to ringfence book spending, preferring instead to leave all funding and management decisions to the local councils in charge. “What I can do is just act as an advocate,” she says.
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