Councils set to merge library services
Wednesday 24th November 2010, 11:30AM GMT.
Library services across 14 West Midland councils are in line to be merged under new cost-cutting plans which are due to be unveiled today.
The Society of Chief Librarians in the region has commissioned consultants to carry out a review into how back office functions could be shared.
It comes on the same day as the cabinets of the four Black Country boroughs were meeting for the first time to discuss sharing services in a bid to save up to £70 million each over five years.
Hundreds of people work in council libraries services. There are 138 full-time equivalent posts in Dudley alone with 121 in Sandwell.
Unnecessarily duplicated back office library functions across the 14 councils, such as stock supply chain, computers, library management systems, specialist services, training, policy, quality and standards, and inquiries may be merged.
The councils involved include Wolverhampton, Walsall, Dudley, Sandwell, Staffordshire, Shropshire, Worcestershire, Stoke-on-Trent and Birmingham.
Janene Cox, a former librarian, and now the strategic commissioner for culture and leisure at Staffordshire County Council, said today: “Like many organisations, the economy drives our budget but has also given us the opportunity to reinvent ourselves.”
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One of the first steps towards A Greater Birmingham authority which will evolve, wityh other areas, into into a larger area within the European super state. Any of these stories are nothing to do with saving money, but all to do with Politcal Ideology
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“Unnecessarily duplicated back office library functions across the 14 councils, such as stock supply chain, computers, library management systems, specialist services, training, policy, quality and standards, and inquiries may be merged.”
Sounds good to me
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So there are two of us on here then eh Stjoe??
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If this was the be all & end all of it, then OK. But it won’t be, this will just be the start of mergers & partnerships between councils. Services will get far worse than now, they will become further distant from the average Joe in the Street & once the Greater Birmingham Authority takes over, a black hole called Birmingham City will suck in all the money gained by being a bigger council to the detriment to all the other areas outside Birmingham.
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Sooner or later everyone in the west midlands area will be paying into birmingham city council or as it will be known the greater birmingham authority.Our seperate idenities will be gone.
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Although the idea sounds good, the practicalities are that the different authorities use different management systems – so there’s a cost to some of buying new systems, transferring data and retraining staff. Also the “back office” has been reduced in previous cost-cutting exercises. There ain’t much fat.
Most of 100+ staff employed at each authority are relatively cheap, often part-time, staff working in libraries. To cut these costs you either reduce opening or close branches.
Authorities should be looking at the expensive departments, such as finance, audit, legal, personnel etc. Could these be shared or merged?
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I would echo the sentiments of other posters. This is an insidious step towards subordination to Brum.
Experience has shown over and over again that bigger is NOT better. The motivation behind such mergers is to create management posts that command significantly higher salaries… Then the empire building starts.
There would be sense in one or two or even up to four authorities cooperating… but this is a silly form of deliberate centralisation. Where will the headquarters be? Will this be like Water or Transport. Industries built by Wolverhampton and then poached (with Government and European help) by Brum? I see another jobs drain in this.
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The only people shouting to save libraries are the overpaid librarians looking to save their own non-existent jobs!
The costs for Dudley are ridiculous. Only last week they were advertising for more librarians at a cost of £16,000 a year. So even if a 100 of the 138 are on that it’s already £1.6million a year…. on book stampers! Ha what a joke, and no doubt some over inflated managers and directors of libraries in Dudley on some eye watering wages.
How many people does it take to stack shelves, stamp a book and turn a computer on?!
Come on Dudley Council get wise, you get books for free or little cost on-line, charity shops or at the supermarket. Save us some cash and send these on an easy job home. Big society will cope with ‘stamping’ the books!
Go to Dudley’s website and fill out the budget survey and send these librarian nerds a packing! Let’s see the money spent on real social causes and improving the borough town centres.
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Perhaps you should get a job as a Librarian first before commenting on what you think they do. Libraries are a great place and should be looked after as much as possible.
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The midlands is ging down the pan because of the small minded narrow visioned people like johnson with no aspirations. THe west midlands ( wolverhampton ) has some of the lowest levels of educational attainment in the country.
£16,000 over paid! its about a quid over the minimum wages. Why would any industry – lets face it there going to have to be high tech to compete in the global economy – want to come to a potential workforce that wants to burn the books and doesn’t have qualifications above a level 2.
Why would they want to set up business in area that has rubbish services, rubbish schools, no leisure facilities. You need to wise up we need to compete for business as a town
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If they really want to save money, and drive up efficiency, why not have a national library service, and do away with the local authority involvement. This smacks of another attempt to set up some form of regional government.
We’ve endured the hated West Midlands County of the 1970s and 1980s, the unloved borough of Sandwell, and more recently there has been a cynical attempt to create a so-called “Black Country sub-region” along the lines of four local authorities which have nothing to do with the historic boundaries of the Black Country. When will the pen-pushers and wannabe politicians realise it is not their place to try and define our identity?
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Those naysayers who deny the need for libraries are usually those who cannot be bothered to read – they learn all they need to know in life from watching Big Brother and X-Factor, and probably only read the labels on beer bottles. If Britain had been built by such we would have gotten precisely nowhere.
Libraries are all about education for those who cannot afford good books and internet access. Self-improvement is their most important ethos – which is why free libraries were founded by the Victorians.
And no you can’t get these books for free off the internet, nor do ebook readers come cheap.
We need to be improving libraries, not destroying them. If some admin services have to be shared, that may be a logical step, but reducing access to learning facilities for all would be madness.
Finally, I don’t favour being ruled over by Brum, they have their own empire-building agenda which would not benefit the Black Country. But if the four Black Country councils pool the three brain cells they each have, they might get somewhere. Not sure where, but we shall have to wait and see.
Meanwhile, let me remind you that the last fashion for book burning nearly destroyed the world. You might not know about that if it weren’t for libraries…
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You have said it all. Couldn’t have said it better myself!!Well done
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Well said, bookworm.
Those who decry the library and it’s staff decry the gateway to knowledge, learning and social engagement. We must protect and support the means for furthering education and self-improvement.
I’m interested in what a merger in services would mean, however, I’d want to see the proposals, first. Can I be the only one feeling that we’re heading back to the days of the unitary authorities?
Best wishes
Bob
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What four Black Country councils? The Black Country is a term dating back to the 15th century, relating to the boundaries of the thick coal seam centring on Dudley; it is nothing to do with some artificial mass of four local authorities created by faceless bureaucrats in 1974. Dudley, Bilston, Willenhall, West Bromwich,Cradley Heath, Rowley Regis, Oldbury and Tipton are in the Black Country; Stourbridge, Halesowen, Wolverhampton, Walsall and Smethwick are not; then there are the grey areas in between.
The point I’m making is I have no problem with councils working together to improve efficiency, it is this arrogant assumption that they think they can redefine our identity (be it “Greater Birmingham” or “Black Country”) along bureaucratic lines.
If Wolverhampton and Dudley want to pool library resources to save money, that’s fine and dandy. But they should respect that there is no common sense of identity between the two towns, any more than there is between Wolves, West Bromwich Albion and Aston Villa. They should not try and create one.
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wolverhampton library has some very fit female librarians
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As 75%of people living in social housing do not have Internet access and therefore could not contribute to this debate, if it were not for FREE Internet at a library, its ok then to close them? Let alone job search, compile a cv or find the cheapest deal for utilities, plus all the other services libraries offer in addition to books, I would think you have not been in a library recently. Come and see for yourself and see beyond the book stamping!
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My wife is a librarian, and she was annoyed at the ‘mini-consultation’ on Newsnight about public services and libraries back in July because Jeremy Paxman didn’t give the man defending libraries on the programme a proper chance to put his case and defend them; Paxman kept cutting over him and interrupting him to talk to the ‘Star Chamber’ instead.
Libraries do a lot of community events, such as Local History Month, and link into a lot of initiatives such as the Cultural Olympiad. In July last year at my wife’s library a ‘Dalek Day’ was held, which brought in a lot of teenage boys who would not have otherwise gone to the library, and who still visited the library after the event. The ‘Dalek Day’ proved a success and was repeated at the other libraries throughout the county, with similar levels of success as the initial event.
Basically, there is a lot more to libraries than issuing books and searching for information; they act as community hubs as well. Do the axemen really want to jeopardise that, or are they ingrained with the Thatcherite doctrine of ‘no such thing as society’?
Hands off!!!
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