Tim Coates' Speech to Conference : Page 5
For example, in a council where the annual library budget is £5.6 m and there is currently a proposal to close half the libraries for financial reasons the council have said the saving will be just £300,000 per annum. Given that that statement simply cannot make sense, a resident wrote and asked how the current budget of £5.6m for the 12 existing libraries was spent. After some weeks the answer came back on one sheet which had five headings that did indeed add up to £5.6m. The heading were for staff costs, without distinguishing how much went on each library, property , stock and other miscellaneous items. However the final item in the column said ‘Uncontrollable expenditure £1.3m’.
Management and management information like that being given to the taxpayers and to the councillors, so far into a plan to close half the service down, demonstrates the woeful state of financial management in the library service and makes one fearful. In my experience that kind of misinformation is totally normal and common. What was meant was that the overhead cost in the council recharged for other services, is £1.3m. No properly managed body can report that nearly a quarter of its expenditure cannot be controlled. None of it can be controlled by the public, all of it must be controlled by the council - by someone - but whoever compiled that sheet to send to electors did not know what that money was spent on and did not see the responsibility to find out.
As Sir Philip Green has said this week, no one should or could run a businesslike operation with confusion like that, and no one should tolerate it. Councils wonder why well-informed citizens get cross with them and as the digital age means citizens are better informed than ever before, councils need to address these inefficiencies or accept that their citizens will get crosser still.
Not only are the simplest management budgeting procedures unclear, but the link from public to councillor is also lacking and ill informed. Councillors, if they are to be responsible need to know much more about the public need and the mechanisms of good practice for public libraries than they have.
Running good libraries is actually not very difficult, but we have made it too complicated. Somebody should have seen through that – that is the great missing leadership of which people write at length.
One is surprised at the waves of ill-advised initiatives which sweep across the service. At the moment every council seems to think that outsourcing services to contracted suppliers operating trusts is the universal answer. The truth is that there is no evidence and they are wrong and mad to be fooled by such fashions. In the same way the idea that the library service can be staffed by untrained, unmanaged volunteers is poor thinking that needs to be challenged.
The second important change to make is that if we are going to make local councillors responsible, as the law says that they are, then we should stop all the national attempts to run the service and determine its policies. Instead we should only be trying to help those councillors manage better for the benefit of the only stakeholder that matters - the public.
Before I come finally to the proposals I want to make I need to talk more about funding of the public library service.
Libraries in England cost us £1,000m each year. We have 150 management structures, each of which places a burden of cost upon and removes the opportunity for high aspiration for quality in the actual libraries themselves. There is too much management and too much expenditure on activity not directly related to the simple library service that the public want to receive. If you go back to my original wish list for libraries : of books, for different age groups, for learning and reading, in buildings which are smart, clean and open - then the expenditure on other activities that are not these, is vast. I have never seen a council in which a third of the cost could not be removed and no one would notice. The arrangement is one that allows little aspiration for energy and excellence.
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