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Culture minister Margaret Hodge has said that libraries should think of selling books as well as lending them. However publication of the full DCMS Library Review and the results of the Wirral Inquiry are to be delayed yet further.
Speaking at the Public Library Authorities (PLA) conference in Brighton this morning (8th October), Hodge told the audience that, although she had been expected to launch the Review at the conference, she needed "a little time to develop and bring in some of the thoughts I have" since returning to her post last month after a year's leave of absence.
But Hodge gave advance hints of the Review's findings, confirming earlier press reports that she was considering an "Amazon-style" home delivery service for libraries, with readers ordering books online and paying "a small fee" to have it delivered to their home. She also suggested that libraries should sell as well as lend: "How about a tie in with Amazon: 'You've borrowed the book, now send a brand new copy to a friend'".
A library ticket for every new born baby to last them through life was also on the cards, as are loyalty cards rewarding book reads with free DVD hires. "We need to offer young people something new and distinctive," Hodge said.
The culture minister also claimed private philanthropy had a greater role to play in funding the service. "Where is the Andrew Carnegie of the 21st century?" she asked, urging library authorities to "polish up your donor cultivation skills".
Meanwhile, publication of the Wirral Inquiry findings will also be delayed for further consultation following Wirral council's decision last week to abandon its planned library closures. "We must now circulate the Wirral's recent decision to all those who gave evidence in the Inquiry," Hodge said.
The culture minister reaffirmed her determination to undertake inquiries in the future "where there is a question mark over whether local authorities have acted within the terms of the 1964 Act", saying she was aware that around 20 other library authorities were watching the findings of the Wirral Inquiry with "more than an entirely academic interest."
The full text of Hodge's speech:
Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. I am delighted to be here this morning, and very pleased indeed to be back as Minister for Culture and Tourism.
People who come to this conference – that's all of you – are a really important group to me. You are the ones who are in charge of delivering library services where it matters: in local communities, and when it matters: day in and day out. And it is not too pompous to say, I think, that you and your teams of front-line librarians truly are often the gatekeepers to knowledge, wisdom and discovery for your communities.
And, as such, you stand at the front of a line that stretches back for nearly 160 years of service to the people of this country. People who, in that time, have made tens, maybe hundreds, of billions of visits to public libraries, borrowing and returning materials – books, mostly – that, if laid end-to-end would stretch from here to...
Well, a very long way, anyway. But that's the thing about libraries, isn't it? Huge numbers and awe-inspiring statistics, and all of them mixed in to a deep reservoir of strong public affection and ubiquitous goodwill.
So public libraries are – and I think we can all agree on this – a very precious service. And they are a service we tamper with at our peril. But from time to time we do have to stop and look at what we are doing, and question whether there are ways we could do things differently. Not change for its own sake, but change to improve. Change to ensure continuing relevance and popularity in a fast changing world. Change to ensure a comprehensive and efficient service, fit for purpose in the 21 century.
As some of you know, I had to step down from Government last year and – again, as some of you will remember – before I did so I helped design a 'Modernisation Review' for the public library service. Andy Burnham, who was Secretary of State at the time, launched the review in October last year, and described libraries as occupying:
“a welcoming and stimulating place at the heart of the community where people can come together to learn.”
And he continued with this thought:
“Learning, literacy and the written word will always be the heartbeat of the service, but there's much that can be done in addition to make them come alive for generations to come.”
And again, I very much doubt if many of you would have any issue with that sentiment. But what does it actually mean? What were the real drivers behind our desire to instigate a review? Let's begin with some hard facts.
Firstly, use of libraries has fallen in recent years. The proportion of people visiting libraries has been falling year on year since we started measuring these figures in 2005.
Even the most recent statistics confirm this worrying trend. In 2007-08, use of libraries had fallen to 45 per cent. Just one year later saw a further dramatic drop of over 5% to less than 40%. Only two in five adults visit public libraries and the weakest attendance is in young people where only a third of 16-24 year olds now visit public libraries.
Secondly, there have been just 63 library closures since 1997 (and this is rather fewer than our critics so often insist) but, more worryingly I think, only seven more library buildings are open for more than ten hours a week than a decade ago; and
Thirdly, books borrowed have fallen by 41 per cent across the last ten years, yet investment by local authorities in library services has gone up by nearly 50 per cent over that same period.
For those of us who care passionately about libraries, and who absolutely want to see libraries continuing to play a central role in the heart of our communities, these are worrying statistics. And they are particularly worrying as council leaders and others are being forced to make tough choices about spending. Choices in an increasingly harsh environment. If you're looking for cuts in a local authority and your usage figures are going in the wrong direction, you are bound to question whether or not to sustain existing levels of expenditure on libraries.
And what's more, some would also argue that the crude statistics I just quoted stand up the proposition that the printed word is declining in popularity, and that this is especially the case among young people. Others might throw in other figures on book stock – down 20 per cent, by the way – and use the figures to justify cuts in the library service.
This, I am afraid, is the simple – and grim - reality of how these decisions are made. But, for my part, I think this misses the point. Yes libraries are changing, but they are doing so in response to wider, and deeper, changes in the way we – and our children and, for some of us, our children's children - live our lives.
Here are some more facts:
Figures published last week show that the average person in the UK spends 30 hours a week on the internet;
99 per cent of children aged 8-17 say that they use the internet, and 80 per cent of households with children have internet access at home; and
For one reason or another, it has never been easier – or cheaper – to buy a printed book. While it would have taken our Victorian forebears days to earn enough to buy the latest Charles Dickens, today a person on average earnings will earn enough in less than an hour.
But this is not depressing or disheartening. And it most definitely is not a call for librarians to put up the shutters and create little time capsules of polished wood, individual cardboard tickets and the reassuring embrace of the Dewey Decimal classification system.
Nor, for that matter, is it to call for a leap into the unknown with massed ranks of computers like hens in a battery farm, a cacophony of ring-tones and chit-chat, and an on-site burger bar.
The answer, of course, is to remember your core purpose and raison d'etre, but most of all to provide a service that people want and will use. Most of the people, most of the time. Yes, there can very often be a tension between local need and existing provision but there can also be scope for a bit of funny business where modernisation is used as a smokescreen for quick and easy spending cuts with no evidence or mandate to back it up.
Let's be clear. Closing libraries is not in itself the work of Satan. It can be the right course, especially where the savings can then be used to provide a really fantastic service elsewhere. The '64 Libraries Act makes this clear, by the way. It anchors the 'comprehensive and efficient' delivery of a local service to the desires and requirements – or 'needs' – of local people. And, from this, it requires local authorities to seek out and understand what those local needs are.
Not what the council reckons the people want. Not guesswork.
Evidence.
And it was local concern, backed by expert analysis, that persuaded us to hold an Inquiry into this issue earlier this year in the Wirral. Now of course I warmly welcome the decision by the local authority to think again about how best to deliver on their statutory obligations – even at this late stage. We must now circulate the Wirral's recent decision to all those who gave evidence to the Inquiry, so that they may have an opportunity to comment on this new evidence before I and the Secretary of State make a formal decision, because the process itself is still live.
I also know that many of you have been watching closely to see what we decide. But whatever the specific circumstances and decision on the Wirral, one thing should be absolutely crystal clear. We have powers – and we will use them - to undertake an Inquiry where there is a question mark over whether local authorities have acted within the terms of the 1964 Act and are providing a comprehensive and efficient service, based on a proper understanding of local needs.
Of course, that is not what we want to do or seek to do, but those powers do exist and it is important that all local authorities abide by their statutory duties as they come to make their local decisions.
I have been told privately, there are said to be around 20 other library authorities who were watching this case with, shall we say, more than an entirely academic interest...
The lesson that I hope those authorities – and all the others come to that – take away from all this is that the wise and enduring library service will be the one that responds to public need. The one that sees the internet revolution not as an obstacle to be steered round but, rather, as an amazing new development whose potential – as an instrument to democratise the written word - we have barely begun to exploit.
So our modernisation review will be published in a rather more fast-moving climate than that which we experienced when Framework for the Future was published, let alone the status quo that our 1964 Libraries Act predecessors enjoyed. And I don't want the review to be the last work on the matter. Indeed, I intend to consult on the document so that we really do share ideas, knowledge and experience as we work to our united aim of keeping a strong, local library service at the heart of every community.
For my part, I'm only too pleased to see reports in the press that suggest really fundamental changes in the landscape you all currently enjoy. I'm all in favour of pushing our thinking to the boundaries, and testing ideas to destruction and, yes, I am thinking about how LoveFilm or Amazon work. What is it about their way of doing things that generates such popularity, wide usage, such customer delight and satisfaction?
The real point, of course, is to try to capture the principle behind this and other ideas. And, in a nutshell, this is all about getting whatever the library equivalent might be for 'bums on seats'. If we make our service popular; if we ensure it is well and widely used, it will be much more difficult to chop it when times are tough.
Fortunately, there are plenty of examples of ways in which library authorities have transformed and modernised their service, and I'm very pleased to salute them.
The new library in Shepherd's Bush, cleverly positioned at the entrance to the Westfield Shopping Centre, was opened last month and is paid for wholly by a Section 106 contribution from Westfield. What's more, the new library has a so-called 'Work Zone' facility where Ealing, Hammersmith & West London College and Job Centre Plus join with the Council to provide a dedicated recruitment and retention service for retailers and employers to fill their jobs locally.
Residents can get work-specific training such as food hygiene certification which is needed to work in many of the restaurants, and employability skills including job interview techniques. There's also financial help with initial childcare costs for unemployed residents who secure Westfield jobs and a planned young person's Westfield work experience service. That seems rather brilliant to me – guaranteeing that a new library is deeply rooted in the needs of its community from the very start.
Meanwhile York Library Service has joined forces with Aviva to provide the Learn and Thrive initiative to help improve the financial capability of residents and users through workshops and training.
The Head of Libraries in Norfolk keeps innovating the service by researching how big retail businesses like Tesco appeal to their consumers, how they respond to the needs of their local residents and how they deliver good customer service. She picks up ideas from the local stores in her area and applies them to the library service.
And in Wigan the Charitable Trust has generated an extra £1.2 million to spend over the last four years. This has translated into extended opening hours, new stock and more partnership projects with schools, health and children's centres.
Technology is also opening up new opportunities for libraries is helping to free up librarians' time from stock management to engage more with visitors, while E-Books are becoming increasingly available in libraries, and are attracting new audiences. Even the dreaded social networking sites are playing a part, enabling libraries to engage more proactively with their users, as well as share ideas and good practice with professionals in other libraries, both nationally and internationally.
Co-location decisions enable visitors to access a number of services and bring a greater profile for the library. In Southend, Gossport and Leicester it has led to significant increases in book lending and library attendance
But I think the toughest nut to crack is drawing in – and, hardest of all, keeping – the younger library users. Increasingly, children are not using libraries to help with their homework – they can source a vast amount of material, sometimes in a worryingly all too 'user-friendly' form, from the internet. And for an enormous number of teens and pre-teens, computer games and social networking sites are a more potent offer than the printed word.
And for an awful lot of this sector, the 'safe, relaxing space' that libraries traditionally offer to all of us comes to them via a plastic machine, not much bigger than a credit card, with distinctive white earphones. How do you reach them?
Because reach them we should. The public library service has to be inclusive and all embracing. It is no exaggeration to say that the future success of this country depends on our young people. They are the people who, potentially, have most to gain from a 'comprehensive and efficient' library service. For them, it can be a helping hand to enhancing educational standards and enhancing people's lives in the process.
People of my generation fulfilling their daily rendez-vous with a warm room, a comfy chair and the morning newspaper were a charming by-product of the service in years gone by but, these days, it's ideas like the brilliant summer reading initiative for children that we embrace, and should be doing more to build on.
We need to offer young people something new and distinctive. You're absolutely right to get cross when politicians like me deal in stereotypes of the libraries of our own childhoods, and ignore all the great work that does go on. But the stats tell us that we have to do still more, and that the technological revolution has to be at the heart of how we get there.
Our Digital Britain White Paper acknowledges this explicitly. It says:
Building a Digital Knowledge Economyin the 21st century will be fundamental to the UK's future prosperity. For the country to reap the maximum benefits we need to put people at the centre of all our digital thinking.
And continues:
The changes that digital technologies bring require us to develop a new level of participation for a competitive digital knowledge economy, and a modern democratic and fair 21st century society. A Digital 'Big bang' will transform how we participate in a modern democracy.
The 'people' mentioned here will be, for the most part, young and already pretty computer literate.
Young people's talent must be helped to flourish. Their potential needs to be realised and we must give them roots and wings. Opportunity should be universal, not means-tested. And this, by the way, is why we are investing, for example, in free theatre for young people. Not that we claim originality in this initiative. As a messenger boy in the Pittsburgh office of the Ohio Telegraph Company, Andrew Carnegie was given free admission to the local theatre. This made him appreciate the work of Shakespeare. Given access to the personal library of Colonel James Anderson, Carnegie borrowed books, read voraciously and largely educated himself. As you all know, he later repaid that opportunity many times over, in his philanthropic support of public libraries in the UK and the United States.
Less widely known is that by he also supported free swimming by paying for the construction of public swimming baths in his home town of Dunfermline. Free swimming, now where have I heard that one recently?
So I wonder, where is the Andrew Carnegie of the 21st Century? Is he or she among your existing users or, more alarmingly, among non-users, whose talent may never be unlocked? Philanthropy has blossomed in other areas of public life, so I am puzzled as to why it seems to flicker so faintly in support of public libraries. A kneejerk response would be that any private contributions would disappear into the morass of local authority budgets. But this need not be the case. Just as with theatres and museums, private giving to libraries could complement public sector funding, enhance their services and their public value. It is not for Government to tell you how to do this. Better to use your own creativity, polish up your donor cultivation skills, and allow the successors of Andrew Carnegies to stand on his shoulders, give back to society, and enable future generations to benefit from public libraries of which everyone can be proud.
The public library review means a lot to me. I was excited to be in at its beginning and I am thrilled to have the chance to be there for the delivery. I know you all expected the report today. You will not be surprised that I want a little time to develop and bring in some of the thoughts I have on how we modernise our libraries to make them relevant today.
A year ago I sketched out some initial ideas . They bear repetition:
Get the opening hours right. When the brilliant new library in Newcastle opened earlier this year, the ceremony took place on a Sunday. What a clever signal to send to users;
Sell as well as borrow. How about a tie in with Amazon: You've borrowed the book, now send a brand new copy to a friend;
A loyalty card that rewards every ten book loans with a free DVD hire;
An internet lending service where you order a book online and pay a small fee to have it delivered to your home, with a reply-paid address label;
A library ticket for every new born baby to last them through life. It's everyone's entitlement, so make taking it up as easy as possible, as early as possible.
The final paper will add to these and try to put more flesh on the bones. I'll present it as a consultation paper because I want you and your colleagues to be part of the continuing process.
CILIP's guidelines on 'What makes a good library service' (published today?) are a fantastically useful reference work for our thinking, by the way. The CILIP principle that 'local library services need to be continually refreshed and improved to respond to the adapting needs of local communities' sounds, on one level, like a sort of Trotskyite 'permanent revolution' but is, I believe, absolutely spot on. And I wholeheartedly commend CILIP's ten point checklist to you all, as sheer practical common sense.
Let me finish this morning with a promise.
I can promise you that the Government remains committed to a strong and modern public library service with local need as the number one driver.
And I can promise you that we will continue to value and champion the amazing work that you – and all your dedicated teams of library workers – deliver .
Thank you.