Tim Coates' Speech to Conference : Page 6
So in these times of public spending cuts, what I say is that, in terms of the library service, they should have happened a long time ago. There is no reason why the service should not take a swingeing cut in its budget and still provide a wonderful library service – with proper management and good buying it really is possible to get more for less.
To be able to take the necessary decisions councillors need to be better informed about their customers and how libraries can be run - and the information needs to come to them not through their own officers, but through a neutral reliable independent source acting on behalf of the public, if one can be found. At the moment there is a gap in the provision of the proper information.
As a start in filling this gap earlier this year a number of library users came together and drafted a Charter which expresses simply the need for more books, longer hours and better buildings and called for a reduction in management structures to save money and liberate individual library managers from the burden of bureaucracy and authority that libraries carry. But we need more than that.
There is, I believe, a need for a ‘Consumers Association’ for public libraries which researches, publishes, disseminates information about the use of libraries and actively shares and explains it to councillors and the public. Of course there is a role in that for the professional managers of the service to participate — but the professional role is in helping councillors and the public provide what the public need. I am known for my belief that the so-called library profession, for public libraries, is not sufficiently responsive to the public and too committed to the state. Their role needs to change and it should be to carry out policy not to create it.
This new body which has been formed in the past few months, which I am announcing today is indeed a Consumers’ Association for libraries. This ‘Library Alliance’, as I anticipate it will be called, is an independent not-for-profit body funded by charitable donation and it will be launched publicly shortly. It will be led by experienced national figures and I hope to play a supporting role. It will take the Charter published earlier this year as its basic belief and then It will conduct research and offer its information service freely to the public and to councils and councillors and its overall and sole aim will be to inform, support and improve the public library service throughout the country from the public point of view. It will do that by improving understanding and the efficiency and effectiveness of library management. It will offer councils the opportunity to participate in major transformation programmes which will reduce cost and improve service and it will help to set these up.
For example I foresee that one of the first projects this body undertakes will be a research into the library needs and provision in a region such as SE London. The researchers will be asked to identify by market research, the different kinds of needs for public libraries for people living and studying in that area and then to research how effectively the 100 or so libraries that are there now actually meet the requirement. It will be able to identify the strengths and the weaknesses of current provision and share that information in full detail both with the public and with the councillors in the London boroughs who are responsible. It will be entirely neutral in the sense that it will have no other interest to proclaim what libraries are achieving apart from what the public wants them to do. It will hold the mirror up to the service plainly and obviously. There will be none of this ‘well the public doesn‘t understand what libraries do these days’ of the kind we hear constantly at present. It will be a force for improvement.
This is, I believe, exactly what is meant by The Big Society, as the Government calls it. It will be an open, transparently funded, endeavour of people who use a public service to identify the ways that it can be improved and encourage them to take place. It will not in any sense be part of Government - but a responsible, properly informed body, borne out of the public need, acting in the general interest in an absolutely essential national service. It will open up the closed channels of communication between those who need libraries and those who operate them. Its success will be measured in the strength of the service in the long term future, whether that be digital or of any other kind.
Senior people in Government and officials in local Government often say that ‘Libraries are Changing’ and they cite electronic and digital developments as means by which those changes have and will come about. But my friends who are library campaigners sharply point to that expression as the dividing line. They say that it has allowed those to abdicate their much more important responsibility to make libraries improve. We want to see a regime in which libraries are not changing but improving.
Today is the first time that I have been able to talk openly about this project which is making good progress and I am grateful to Martyn and to you all for giving me the opportunity to make the news public.
Thank you.
End