Consutation, Budgets and Services-There's an Elephant in The Room

There’s an understandable rush of energy around the proposed 30% reduction in funding for Dudley Library Services and this equates to around ￡1.5 million spread over 3 years-so ￡500,000 a year. In a recent interview with Radio WM(11/5/23), some interesting ideas were articulated by the Leader of Dudley Council, ones that spoke of “Duty (ies), efficiencies and enhanced funding streams, increasing the use of libraries by opening up possibilities for usage by other organisations and groups.

All good so far? Well on the surface of it, this is “mom and apple pie!” Why not increase usage, develop funding streams and widen engagement to the benefit of communities served? It’s hard to argue against isn’t it? But there’s a health warning here. The Leader of The Council stressed that we are in a consultation period. My concern here is that the consultation process will effectively reduce the energy of those groups and individuals who have made their feelings of anger and let down absolutely clear. Consultation is not negotiation and there’s no obligation to do anything with the results of a consultation process other than to “make note of it.”

I recently was engaged with a significant piece of work that brought together Council Members and Officers from across England and Wales. When we looked at the specific challenges faced in delivering a vital (and statutory) programme of change, financial issues dominated the agenda. It wasn’t always about the amount of money available, it was more to do with the erratic nature of funding and its impact on setting revenue budgets and identifying capital budgets. There is no point in starting stuff that you can’t commit to seeing through. It’s bad for everyone involved and elected members are unlikely to want to be associated with failed headline projects.

In a previous incarnation when working in Local Government, one of the many questions we asked ourselves when we were asked to produce “efficiency savings”? (cuts), was “What do we HAVE to do?” (Statutory Duties). The decisions taken as an outcome of this process resulted in a significant dilution of service provision in every aspect imaginable. What we did was efficient, but the service(s) were nowhere near as effective: efficiency and effectiveness are not the same thing.

So there are in my view, a couple of challenges for Dudley Council.

Challenge 1. Come up with a draft plan of what an EFFECTIVE library service might look like, what would it do and who else would be involved, what would you like to see happening that’s either (a) not happening now or (b) is a reliable model of good practice happening here or elsewhere??

Challenge 2. Demonstrate how you will secure the finding necessary to make good (and even better!) the ￡500,000 p.a shortfall, with guarantees of longer term commitment from all agencies and organisations involved.

There’s an amount of noise around the current situation and that’s great. However, how energy, pressure and momentum is maintained by pressure and support groups is, I think, going to be vital in ensuring that there is as good an outcome as is possible for Dudley.

#libraries #lifelonglearning #community #localgovernment