When Cambridgeshire County Council decided (in their Strategic Review of Service 2002) that funding necessitated the closure of some of the libraries in the region, they considered the following:
Libraries were assessed for closure against a range of both performance and community criteria: including current use, 5 year and 20 year performance trends, costs, population, distance from other libraries, public transport, social and rural deprivation, predicted growth of the community etc.
They then had a number of meetings for consultation with communities to discuss alternative library provision, so that people affected would have the opportunity to discuss the proposals and to feedback local views through feedback forms in every library and by e-mail.
With regard to the local closure, there has been no consultation, no time given for feedback, no alternative provisions suggested, and no attempts at finding alternative funding or working in partnership with other organisations, or seeking, for instance, volunteer support.
Instead, we are presented with a proposal with such indecent haste that apparently the library staff first knew about this upon reading it in the JEP. This is the political equivalent of knocking down Janvrin’s farm - do it as quietly and quickly as possible so that by the time the dust settles, it will be too late!
The scales are weighed with library closures against larger class rooms. Administration does not seem to feature at all in the latest cuts, which would appear - strangely - to apply only to the front-line areas in education; no consideration is given to outsourcing administrative functions, where higher levels of savings could be made, and general management skills rather than specific front-line skills are required.
A.M. Bellows, B.Sc.