The library, like the pub, the village hall and the church is a vital community institution - even if you don't use it

...the contexts in which civil society operates have become much more hostile. In most parts of the world, communities are increasingly divided. Violence, intolerance and inequality are on the rise. Authoritarians of different stripes have gained a foothold. Restrictions on freedom of speech and association are increasingly common, with just three per cent of the world’s population now living in countries where civic space is defined as “fully open.”And public spheres seem incapable of addressing any of these concerns.

This depressing picture of civic society's polarisation comes from Michael Edwards at Open Democracy as he asks how we escape from the tribalism of modern society - we see more and more groups representing "...a particular position, identity or interest..." and fewer groups "...that attract a diversity of members in terms of class and political affiliation". In part this reflects how politics and political positioning has clustered more and more around these ideas of identity and interest especially on the left. For all the talk of inclusion and equalities, we live in an increasingly fragmented and isolating society.

A while ago I came to the conclusion that the route to community cohesion has to come through the things we share rather than the things where we differ. When I stand with some of my Muslim neighbours watching a firework display, we share the same joy and pleasure at the display - our differences in faith, culture and background are of little consequence. When I go into the local Co-op I share the same mundane experience as all the customers, our identity is not a matter at issue or concern.

We don't have a library in Cullingworth (I don't think we've ever had a library although village old-timers may correct me on this one) but it seems to me that communities taking pleasure in literacy is another of those things that break us away from this polarising emphasis on identity. Yet the way in which we conceive of a library remains caught in the past - perhaps because too few of us make regular use of libraries. My Mum and Dad went to the library once a fortnight and borrowed twelve books and whenever you visited they'd be sat there book to hand. And when you've read six books a week for 70 years, it's fair to say that the breadth of subject for conversation gets pretty broad - literacy is a wonder.

But libraries, created at a time when books were, relative to income, expensive now face a world where books are largely speaking much cheaper. Plus alternatives multiply as the digital world of film, audio, games and words explodes. But these worlds act to reinforce isolation and polarisation too - going to a library is a social act, I'm not so sure scrolling through a Kindle recommends list can be described as one. The problem is that, despite this, fewer of us are using libraries - from 2006 to 2016 users in England declined from over 48% of the population to 33%. That's still a third of the population using libraries but the trend in use is still downwards driven by the digital world and, increasingly, by decisions to close libraries (the matter of local government funding is a whole other subject - you can read some of my thoughts here).

For all the wrong reasons we are pulling funding from libraries, shuffling them into the voluntary sector (and I don't want to belittle community run libraries as they're fantastic places run by super volunteers), and closing them down. And Councils are using the excuse of declining usage and the advancing digital world to justify these decisions even though they all know its really because of the underfunding of social services. To return to where we started, the library like the village hall, the parish church and the pub is a neutral place free from that polarising focus on identity. And libraries do more than just lend you a book.

I asked Twitter whether people still used the library and can confirm that, at least in the unrepresentative world of my Twitter feed, this is the case. But what struck me most was how much, for want of better words, other stuff libraries do. Here are a few:

A quiet place to work
After-school clubs
Somewhere to read the newspapers
Audio and ebooks
Music recitals
A place to write
Children's play
A performance space
Lectures and demonstrations
Job search and advice
Health signposting and advice
Poetry and book readings
Book signings
Meetings
Printing out documents, homework

The problem - and again this might, in part, be a resource issue - is that most people haven't the first idea these things are available. This is from the USA but I'm pretty confident you'd find a similar answer in England:

The survey notes that while 62 percent of libraries offer online career and job-related resources, 38 percent of adults don’t know whether their library offers them. Likewise, 35 percent of libraries offer high school equivalency classes, and nearly half of adults don’t know whether their libraries offer them. The numbers are similar for programs on starting a new business, online programs that certify people who’ve mastered a new skill, and ebook borrowing.

The latter is an especially glaring example of the dissonance between services provided and knowledge of those services. While 90 percent of libraries offer ebook lending, 22 percent of adults say they don’t know whether their library offers ebooks, and 16 percent say their library does not offer ebooks.

If we want strong communities - and I'm a conservative so I definitely want this - we need to treasure the spaces and places that allow for exchange and interaction beyond the boundaries of our identity and interest groups, outside our tribe. But, like so much that's done by local government, the national debate is characterised by MPs thinking they know better and Whitehall trying to get a pounds worth of sweets for ten shillings. We all know these institutions matter but carry on doing things that put them under threat.

Libraries are more than just places filled with books, they're a community institution that helps bridge divides in society, promotes cohesion and provides a neutral space for that community. Government is failing us if it doesn't see its role as making sure that these sort of institutions are cherished. And funding for such vital places is probably more important than free broadband, bidding for the world cup finals or building superfast trains systems.


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Why we don't need an Evidence Information Service (but do need better access to evidence)

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Whenever I think about evidence-based policy making and the use of data by government, my mind turns to an article by Dr Vince-Wayne Mitchell:

Demographic segmentation variables are cheap and easy to measure, while psychographic variables are more expensive and harder to measure, but can provide more insight into consumers’ psychology. Suggests that a prima facie case exists for the suitability of astrology as a segmentation variable with the potential to combine the measurement advantages of demographics with the psychological insights of psychographics and to create segments which are measurable, substantial, exhaustive, stable over time, and relatively accessible. Tests the premise empirically using results from a Government data set, the British General Household Survey. The analyses show that astrology does have a significant, and sometimes predictable, effect on behavior in the leisure, tobacco, and drinks markets. Discusses managerial implications of the results in terms of market segmentation and promotion.

Dr Mitchell is a very highly regarded researcher in consumer behavious and marketing and I've no idea whether he believes in horoscopes or not. But what these results tell us is that we should treat the findings of research studies with a degree of caution. Just because it's badged as science doesn't mean that it's right or that there isn't some other research telling us something entirely different, even opposite. Indeed we know that sometimes supposedly evidence-based policy is anything but:

In 1980, after long consultation with some of America’s most senior nutrition scientists, the US government issued its first Dietary Guidelines. The guidelines shaped the diets of hundreds of millions of people. Doctors base their advice on them, food companies develop products to comply with them. Their influence extends beyond the US. In 1983, the UK government issued advice that closely followed the American example.

The most prominent recommendation of both governments was to cut back on saturated fats and cholesterol (this was the first time that the public had been advised to eat less of something, rather than enough of everything). Consumers dutifully obeyed. We replaced steak and sausages with pasta and rice, butter with margarine and vegetable oils, eggs with muesli, and milk with low-fat milk or orange juice. But instead of becoming healthier, we grew fatter and sicker.

We see this problem repeated time and time again - governments enact legislation that draws on the scientific evidence, on the environment (diesel cars), in health (vaping), in criminal justice (tagging), and farming (agricultural protection) only for the results to be either sub-optimal or else for evidence to arise showing the policy to be plain daft. In part this is because evidence isn't definitive - in the case of fat, there were a different set of scientists who government ignored saying we should look instead at carbohydrates and sugar. And the same is true on vaping - the experts used by the World Health Organisation and European Union to support severe restrictions on vaping and the sale of vaping products are countered by another set of experts with a very different position who argue that vaping should be encouraged by public health not controlled.

The problem here is that these experts move from being producers of evidence to recommenders of policy. After all, when researchers write up their findings for publication they will be expected by the journal (and probably their funders) to comment on the implications of their findings as well as to describe limitations and the areas where further research should focus. The findings, however, don't necessarily tell us what the policy should be - we may discover, for example, links between high levels of sugar consumption and type-2 diabetes but this doesn't mean we have to introduce a soda tax. Other policy solutions - or none -  are available and just as valid.

This brings me to the proposal set out by Chambers et al in The Guardian, for a new Evidence Information Service:

Our idea is to create a hub for connecting a broad network (hive-mind) of UK scientists and researchers with the political community. At present, the knowledge and expertise of more than 150,000 UK scientists and academics is being underutilised. To ensure the smartest possible democracy we need to create the largest active network of engaged scientists and researchers in the world, and then we need to use it.

Superficially this seems a great idea - make it easy for politicians (and a slightly sinister grouping entitled "policy-makers", who presumably aren't necessarily politicians) to connect with the academic and research body of knowledge. The authors go on to observe that there's an imbalance in the information available - ministers have more policy-making resource than a back bench MP or opposition spokesperson. And, as the leader of an opposition group on a large metropolitan council, I can confirm that this is true. The question is whether creating this Evidence Information Service really improves the way in which policies are decided?

I think not. Indeed, I think there are genuine risks in the proposal were it to be implemented.

Firstly, the connection made for the policy-maker isn't a connection to the evidence but is a connection "with specialist experts in that field". Now it may be that these experts simply hand across their evidence to the policy-maker who goes off to craft his policy on painting bus lanes green or whatever. Or it could be that the policy-maker asks the researcher what his or her policy prescription is rather than just for evidence. It's also likely that confirmation bias kicks in - a left wing policy-maker might seek out or prefer evidence from a sympathetic source while ignoring evidence from a source that seems counter to that policy-maker's ideology (this, of course, applies to conservative policy-makers equally).

The second problem is that the proposed Evidence Information System creates valorised and non-valorised evidence. So evidence provided by the new system is 'good' evidence whereas evidence from outside that system is not to be trusted. And because the Evidence Information System is entirely about institutional researchers (academics, in effect) the value of independent research and evidence from outside that sphere is undermined. By way of example, the proposed new system excludes commercially procured research, good quality journalism (including blogs and websites), many think tanks and opinion polling. There is an assumption that only those "150,000 UK scientists and academics" are a valid source of evidence for policy-making.

Next we have the problem of ideology. By this I don't mean socialism vs neoliberalism but rather than policy-decisions are informed by ideological issues. To use vaping as an illustration, we can see two distinct ideological positions within public health and tobacco control. To simplify a little these are essentially Harm Reduction and Gradual Prohibition. This divide applies throughout, to policy-makers and to researchers. No amount of evidence showing how vaping reduces harm will persuade someone ideologically committed to Gradual Prohibition as the purpose of tobacco control. We can pull across this issue into any area of public policy - we encouraged diesel engines because they had lower carbon emissions but now pay a price as those engines have a negative impact on urban air quality and health. In the proposed Evidence Information System there is no safeguard, no means of knowing whether research is ideologically-framed (or more likely, how that research is ideologically-framed). And we can't assume that researchers - especially in social science fields - don't fall foul of confirmation bias or ideological preference.

Lastly we need to get some idea as to what we mean by evidence (knowing from the start that this is a very contested idea). On the one hand we have data which is just that, a great pile of information that, if we're not careful, throws up evidence along the lines of the Mitchell research I opened with. Without some form of analysis, data is pretty useless but which is the better route - giving policy-makers the tools to interrogate the data or getting that interrogation mediated by (possibly biased, perhaps ideological) academic researchers? We then have - especially since it is social science research that will dominate policy-maker enquiry - the issue of 'soft' evidence. Is a qualitative study gathering the views of 50 teachers on in-class discipline more or less valid than a big analysis of Ofsted reports in 1000 primary schools? And what about discussion, op-ed and speculation, where do these fit in - they're important to academia but do they form part of the evidence base?

I applaud the attempt to get better data, information and evidence in front of those who design, decide and implement public policy but don't think that an Evidence Information System as described is the way to proceed. If the issue is asymmetric access to evidence surely the answer is to get more open data and better (easier to use perhaps) tools for using that data. I also worry that the Evidence Information System would create a different asymmetry in access to and use of evidence by valorising only academic evidence. Finally, governments can and do lean too heavily on evidence in decision-making often, as anyone familiar with England's Local Plan process would attest, to the point of sclerosis or even stasis.

Policy-making will always be a balance between having enough evidence and the need to act. It has always been something of a cop out to say, "we need more evidence", when you actually need to do something. And the interest of voters will always trump evidence in the minds of people who are elected by those voters - this is why there's no comprehensive review of London's 'green belt' and why Australia scrapped its carbon tax. Finally, we need to remember that - remember the diesel engines issue - different policy area conflict and the policy decision is not simply a matter of looking at one set of evidence but rather at a series of sets that can point to radically different decisions.

There's a good case for better connections between researchers and the real world - not just politicians but business people, writers, charities and schools - but this proposal doesn't achieve this outcome and would create a service with limited access. Far better would be to negotiate a public library license with publishers making all that evidence - and the search tools needed to use it - available in every community and for every person.

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Hating the untidiness of whimsy - the curse of local councils

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Control, direct, order, limit, ban, manage, prevent, dictate, regulate, licence, stop.

Sadly these are the words that best define much of local government - and us local councillors. This is what we do - we stand in the way of community, cooperation, choice, innovation and initiative. And we revel in it.

In a statement the city of Leawood issued to TODAY, an official said that a property maintenance code enforcement officer had noticed the bookshelf but "thought it was placed in the yard for pick up." Several days later, the officer received complaints about it and notified the family the structure violated a city ordinance that states “no detached structure, including garages, barns, sheds, greenhouses, above ground pools, or outbuildings, shall be permitted."

And what was it that so offended the officials of this Kansas town? It was one of these:

In its most basic form, a Little Free Library is a box full of books where anyone may stop by and pick up a book (or two) and bring back another book to share.

A nine-year-old child had set one up in his yard. A little private initiative - done with hope and a smile - to build a local community. Stamped out by the council because some busybody 'complained' and some jobsworth decided the little box of books in the garden was an illegal structure.

Don't try to tell me that your council is immune from this obsession with tidiness and the tin-pottery of control. Here in Bradford you need a licence to have a village gala. Not for safety reasons but because the Council wants to 'exercise its market charter rights'. And your council will be the same - a little ban here, a stern letter there. Whether it's the spirited citizen who's told to stop mowing the verge outside his house or the children who are stopped from their little bit of guerrilla gardening, your local officials will react to any community initiative by either wanting to stop it happening or else to bring it within their control and regulatory orbit.

But, and this is important, those intrusive officials are only doing what they know people want. Every day they encounter people who would stop someone drinking quietly on a bench, prevent a second takeaway opening on the high street and ban any number of odd but essentially harmless activities. As Scott Doyon, in writing about the Little Boy with the Little Free Library observes, we really have a problem with whimsy - and certainly independently initiated whimsy in someone's garden:

The second error is that you add value to whimsy by making it more uniform and predictable when that’s actually the exact opposite of what happens. A Little Free Library, or any other inspired creative expression, is like a flower growing through a crack in the sidewalk. You don’t make it more palatable by camouflaging it as concrete.

If we want interesting places filled with interesting people doing interesting things then we have to stop doing what people who want boring places filled with boring people doing boring things want us to do. We - and that means political and community leadership - need to stop thinking that the role of the local parish, town, village or district council is to look sternly at whether someone should be allowed a house extension, to run a fair, to open a cafe or, madly, to want a shark on the roof.

Councils are filled with people who see the busy-ness of local community as a problem, who tut and frown at folk outside a pub drinking and laughing and who think only regulations, controls, bans and licences stand between civilisation and anarchy. And who hate the untidiness of whimsy.

This, more than anything else, is the curse of local government. We are wielders of the permit and the permission not huggers of the whimsical and weird. Perhaps we could change it round! The world would be more fun I think!

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Open Access: It's not free you know - not even a little bit...

The Internet I mean. Yet that's what people persist in believing - and worse that somehow forcing it all to be 'free' (it isn't free by the way) is some kind of righteous moral crusade:

"The world's entire scientific and cultural heritage, published over centuries in books and journals, is increasingly being digitized and locked up by a handful of private corporations."

Now let's deconstruct this argument.

Firstly, prior to the arrival of the Internet and digital technologies, that scientific and cultural heritage was found typed onto paper stored as journals, books, monographs and so forth in myriads of libraries across the world. Nothing that MIT has done - or for that matter any of the publishers of academic research - changes this situation. Those books and other source materials are still 'locked up' in libraries and archives. Some of which have public access but most of which don't.

The point of JSTOR and other similar digital archives isn't to wickedly exploit the world's heritage but to ensure that, whatever happens to the current holders of that heritage, it remains available to the world's researchers. And the process of digitizing that heritage isn't cheap but right now is being paid for by the fact that JSTOR is able to recover costs from users (who otherwise might have to trip round the world to view the documents in question unless the holders of those documents were happy to use the well-established 'inter-library loan' system).

The question for all these self-righteous campaigners for "open access" is therefore, who pays? After all there's still a cost to digitizing content - it has to be scanned, key-worded, indexed, abstracted and stored in a searchable and recoverable way. And funnily enough all that work costs a lot of money. Then it has to be made available, promoted, catalogued and the server space paid for. This also costs a lot of money.

If the user isn't going to pay - directly through a per-use fee or indirectly via their institution - then somebody else has to cough up. And the only remaining candidate for stumping up the cash is the government - the taxpayer. So, far from being a liberation, so-called "open access" simply involves handing control of the entire system to the government and the costs to a load of people who have no interest in accessing the information.

So we replace a system where the world's intellectual heritage is largely available when needed to people who want to use it but which costs the taxpayer nothing with a system where everyone - including all those folk who aren't interested - can access but where there's a multi-billion dollar cost to the taxpayer.

This isn't about copyright but about how we pay for things we want - like saving the world's heritage for posterity. And it's much better done without loads of extra cost on the poor old taxpayer don't you think?

Finally, let's remember that seeking - through hacking and illegal downloading - to undermine this process serves nobody. It threatens the work of academic societies, it undermines the librarianship and archiving role of libraries and it means that access can only be sustained if it is the government's wish for that access to be sustained.

However we look at it, Open Access isn't free. Unless of course you steal the books.

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I guess most members of the Society of Authors never studied statistics...

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A little storm on a bookshelf stirred up by the Society of Authors (an august body that I'd never heard of - can't see why authors need a society but, hey, that's there business) over the Public Lending Right (PLR) scheme that gives authors a payment based on how many times their books are borrowed from public libraries.

Last week DCMS confirmed that most community libraries will not be included in the Public Lending Right scheme (PLR) which provides authors with a modest payment...

And...

Taking volunteer libraries out of the scheme will lead to a drop in book loans which may encourage Government to propose cutting the already meagre fund still further.

Essentially, the Society of Authors having had the system explained to them (a sample of libraries is taken - mostly for convenience large central libraries - from which an estimate of borrowing numbers is calculated) have decided to make up a scare story to cover up their embarrassment. There are actually no changes to the scheme and authors will be paid precisely what they would have been paid prior to the arrival of these community (i.e. volunteer run) libraries.

More importantly, the argument that "taking volunteer libraries out of the scheme will lead to a drop in book loans" is patent nonsense. Unless of course the Society of Authors can find some evidence that borrowing rates have some relationship to the amount of PLR paid to authors - which that can't because there isn't any.

And somehow I doubt that authors will suddenly stop writing because that cheque for £270 (roughly the average author payment under the scheme) doesn't land on the mat. Or is a little less - perhaps £220.

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...a thought about 'open access' publishing (from someone cleverer than me)

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So the great and good want academic research published 'open access' at enormous cost - probably to the taxpayers (nearly all of whom won't have any need or interest in 'accessing' said publications). It is, was and always will be something of a daft idea.

However, Cullingworth's resident publishing expert (yes we have one) suggests that a far simpler solution would be to negotiate a national public library licence with the publishers and aggregators. It would cost a lot of money but far - the expert's precise words were "far, far, far, far" - less than the cost to taxpayers of the nonsensical 'open access' proposals.

Just a thought.

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Academic publishing and the 'tragedy of the commons'

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I'm sure Mr Worstall did so inadvertently but his castigation of the Royal Society's 'save the planet' report also explained another first world problem - why 'open access' publishing doesn't work:

"...if you have an open access commons and then demand for that resource exceeds the regenerative capacity of the resource, then you have to move away from a Marxian (his word) open access commons to some form of limitation of access. This limitation of access could be social (socialist) or private property (capitalist) but some form of limitation there must be."

You see that the problem for academics (and university libraries - although this is mostly special pleading to protect their budgets) is that 'open access' still uses up the limited resource of time and money available for the purpose of publishing. And because the user is not paying, that money and time isn't replaced. Or rather, the taxpayer's representatives trim the money available as they choose to direct it to other purposes.

So the outcome of 'open access' publishing won't, in the end, be open access but will be access that is rationed or controlled in someway. Most likely, since this is how the world works, by charging users for the use they make of the resource. However, it will be the Universities that collect this money rather than publishers.

And where did all those publishers start? Oh, yes - universities. Looks to me more and more like a power grab rather than a liberalisation of access.

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When is a saving not a saving? A tale of some libraries

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Readers will know that the Labour leadership of Bradford Council decided – with support from our local Liberal Democrats – that two libraries in Bingley Rural, at Wilsden and Denholme, should be closed as part of the budget “savings”. Along with three other libraries elsewhere, this action was to contribute £70,000 out of the £56,000,000 total saving.

Now, leaving aside the spiteful nature of such a cut, it appears that the saving is rather a fiction. Here’s part of the letter given to “users” of the library:

All the staff who currently work in these libraries will be redeployed to other libraries in the district.

In conjunction with this the Council will consult with local communities about how best to deliver their library service in the light of the reductions to the library service budget. The Council will also carry out a community needs assessment.

So let’s get this right – closing the libraries will not result in any savings in staff costs, there are unlikely to be any economies in the book budget as a result and the Council will also have to introduce new stops in its mobile service to pick up the reduction in service to these villages.

Three out of the five closing libraries are run from Council-owned premises (not specialist libraries but community centres) so there is no saving in rent and the impact on central overheads must be small given these are libraries mostly open just ten hours each week.

In truth – or at least as far I am able to ascertain – closing the two libraries in Bingley Rural will actually save Bradford Council the cost of the rent for space in Wilsden Village Hall (less that £2,000) and a minimal amount in heating and lighting.  It seems to me that closing these libraries merely realises make-believe savings in “full cost recovery” and central overheads that could, in truth, have be achieved without closing a single library.

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How not to make cuts - a lesson from Bradford

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I’ve been pretty straight when asked about the cuts – they are needed because we can’t afford to spend money the way we have for years. At the same time I think we should do local communities and local people the justice of being transparent, open and honest.

On Saturday – just a few days before Bradford Council sets its budget – my ward colleagues and I received the news that the Council’s Labour leadership intended to close the two small libraries in Bingley Rural ward (Denholme and Wilsden). This will realise a saving of some £12,000, we’re told (although it is rolled into the closure of 5 libraries to save £70,000). We got the news from reading the local paper not from the Council itself.

Now it may be the right decision to close these libraries – certainly the levels of usage aren’t great and the opening hours have diminished with each passing year – but the manner in which Bradford’s Labour leaders have gone about it is appalling.  We are being forced into a situation of trying to find ways to keep the libraries open set against a deadline that is now just a few hours away.

I could point out that the Council pays for full-time trade union convenors – to the tune of £300,000 and more. I could observe the team of ‘climate change’ officers costing local taxpayers approaching £500,000. And I could observe that we’re still paying 55p per mile to car users when every one else is paying just 40p per mile.

And I could go on listing example after example of achievable, affordable savings that have, at worst, a marginal impact on front line services. Yet I shan’t – instead I’ll talk about giving local communities a chance. A stay of execution so they can explore, with council officers and others, the opportunities to take over running these local facilities that Labour – out of political spite – has chosen to close.

Here’s what Wilsden Parish Council has to say:

In terms of process there has been no consultation whatsoever with the Parish Council or any other element of the community and the timescale from the announcement in the Telegraph and Argus on Saturday to a decision process on Thursday makes a total mockery of democratic process. The time scale available makes it impossible for the Parish Council to convene a meeting that complies with standing orders to discuss the proposal.

It is also difficult to determine the rationale for the selection. The budget proposal before Council on Thursday recommends closing the smallest libraries referred to in the Bradford Library Service Review 2010.  Size appears to equate with opening hours. The Library Service Review simply records Wilsden as being one of five libraries to have opening hours of less than 10 hours per week (para 3.12)

 However the report then goes on to say in paras 3.22 and 3.23 “in resource terms the provision and use of the thirteen village libraries is broadly commensurate with the staff resources and opening hours allocated” and “given the relatively small floor space available at these thirteen village libraries the levels of use are relatively strong”. Wilsden  (and indeed the other four libraries recommended for closure) does not therefore appear to be a failing library that is not worth retention.

It seems to me that Labour are seeking the maximum service pain so as to realise the biggest political gain.

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Update: At tonight's Wilsden Neighbourhood Forum the nature of Labour's spite was revealed - the saving from closing Wilsden library is a massive £8,000.  That's less than the Executive's travel bill.

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Libraries really do need to change, you know

Yesterday, I had an interesting, if inconclusive conversation about the future of public libraries. Partly, this took place in the context of funding being withdrawn from the Bookstart** programme – a decision, some suggest will result in thousands of illiterate youths littering our streets unable to take a full part because they didn’t have “access” to books when they were at school.

Now, stepping aside from this argument (although I do note that even with this wonderful scheme we’re managing to churn out a truly depressing number of innumerate, illiterates from our schools), I think it sensible to consider the point and purpose of the public library. And, indeed whether the manner in which we organise the service continues to fit the purpose.

Bradford has 32 libraries (plus a mobile service of which more later) that get around 29,000 visits each week (which is around 1.5 million each year) from a population of 506,000 – which means that just below 6% of the district’s population visit in a given week. For a service seen as so critical to the future of the district this is a pretty poor show especially when 36% of library users are over 60 (and 31% describe themselves as “wholly retired”)*.

The truth is that public lending libraries are – to most of us – something of an anachronism. A generation of people brought up to use libraries continue to do so but there isn’t a replacement generation – or more accurately, not sufficient of a replacement generation to justify sustaining public lending libraries in their current form.

At the same time we continue to read – and in growing quantities if book sales figures are to be believed (these are for Q1 2010):

It reports that home sales have grown marginally by volume from 84.3m to 84.4m units, while value decreased by 3.3% from £287m to £278m. Conversely, export value sales grew by 2.4% from £196m to £201m, while volume sales decreased by 4.5% from 54.2m to 51.8m units.

And the biggest driver behind that increase was “volume sales of children’s books”!

Any local councillor will tell you, however, that you meddle with libraries at your peril! And you certainly don’t close them – that’s a sure recipe for petitions, protests and “more-in-sorrow-than-anger” letters to the local papers. Yet those same people protesting are often the very same people who have stopped using the library. The 94% who won’t be visiting this week.

Moreover, that 6% aren’t the needy, the poor, those who can’t afford to buy books. They are people who like the fact that they can get reading for free from the local council. Most of them are middle-class folk who also buy a lot of books. We should not kid ourselves that the poor are going anywhere near libraries – except on those one or two compulsory occasions when, in a search for scenery change the class teacher drags her charges down to the library.

We should begin to think more creatively about libraries – co-locating them with schools, increasing the use of mobile libraries that allow places like Cullingworth to have a service despite not having a library, targeting specific groups such as the housebound and disabled (particularly those with impaired vision where the general market doesn’t always suit) and making use of the library buildings for a wider range of services.

Above all thought should be given to what attracts folk – the old reading room concept no longer works, the lending library function is declining and specialist services (film, music and such like) are often better provided on-line. It beats me why great town centre libraries like that in Keighley don’t partner with one of the coffee chains – taking a leaf from the bookshop book so to speak. And why should we not charge those borrowing books a modest subscription? Most could afford £25 a year to use the library (and we could give discounts to children and workless) and that would go some way towards securing the service.

Lending libraries came about because books – and they were hardback books – were expensive. It meant that people who couldn’t afford all those pricey publications could have access to them – could read the wonders of our great canon of literature (or – as is more common – six romance novels a fortnight).

Today it isn’t the price of books that stops people from reading, it’s that people aren’t interested in reading. They don’t want to bury themselves in what some smug literary critic (in this case from the Guardian) calls “thought-provoking books” because, to put it pretty bluntly, most of the literary novels that clutter up the prize shortlists are really dull. A little bit of me smiles with pleasure at the fact that Katie Price (or rather whoever wrote the book with her name on) outsells the entire Booker shortlist!

The time has come to free local councils from the straitjacket of their statutory duty and to allow a new generation of creative centres of knowledge, learning and pleasure to replace the old, stale and declining public lending library.

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*I will add a caveat to this by saying that the user survey – because of the way it is conducted almost wholly fails to capture numbers of users under the age of 15

**As a slight aside - I fail entirely to see why the publishing industry, filled as it is with wealthy, righteous lefties like Paul Hamlyn can't find it in its heart and deep pockets to find £10 million or so to carry on the programme. That seems a more honest and honourable approach than holding a gun to the taxpayers' heads

The Smoking Ban Problem - polls, libraries and predicting future behaviour

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Many experts on polling question the effectiveness of the “what if” question:

“If politician X was leader of Party Y why would you be more or less likely to vote for them”

There are too many chances to be wrong for this to make much sense as a question – Politician X isn’t leader, you many already have a 100% likelihood of voting for Party Y, the election is in the future. In essence this type of question expects people to make a prediction of their own behaviour following a given change – a we are not especially good predictors of our own future behaviour under such circumstances. Indeed, these questions are really just a variation on “who would you prefer to be leader” or “which policy would you prefer”.

Which brings us to the way in which these questions are used to justify policy decisions. By way of benign example, let’s talk about libraries. Most of the population are not members of a public library and have at best a very occasional engagement with the library service. This isn’t to say we don’t want libraries – we’ll fight hard to protect these vital local services even though they are not services we (or anyone we know) makes use of.

Faced with this problem – declining library membership – the local council undertakes a review part of which involves surveying the public. But first the council thinks of lots of exciting things to do with or put it its libraries – computers, coffee machines, self-service issuing of books, book clubs, kids parties - you name it. And in the survey the council asks whether these things will make non-users more or less likely to use the library.

Now let’s assume that library non-users (or a majority of them) say that some or all of the changes will make them more likely to use the library. Seizing on this, the council rushes through the changes – despite that fact that current library users have said they don’t want these changes. Ah, says the Council, the policy will attract loads of new users to the library and we’ll be in clover!

So what happens? Well the current users of the library don’t like the changes (noisy kids, impersonal service, coffee stains all over the table and so on) and some decide to get their reading material from Oxfam or Waterstones. And those non-users who said they would be “more likely” to use the library? Not a sign of them. Result of the policy changes? Probably further library closures, reductions in the book fund and another review.

This is precisely what happened with banning smoking in pubs – non-users said they didn’t like pubs because of the smoke. And that they would be “more likely” to use the pub is smoking was banned. Existing regular pub users – overwhelmingly – opposed the ban preferring good extraction, separate smoking rooms and other measures. But no – banning smoking would make pubs more popular. Those non-users said so, didn’t they?

In truth those non-users said nothing of the sort – they didn’t go to pubs because they didn’t like pubs. And the smoking was just one factor – mostly they didn’t see the pleasure in sitting a drinking away from their comfortable homes. Nothing to do with smoking, nothing at all. And, following the ban, these non-pubgoers have not started going to the pub while at the same time loads of previous pubgoers now stop at home where they can smoke. With fewer regulars, the remaining hardy folk began to drift away and the local was left with three customers at 10pm on a Friday night.

The result? The pub closes. The community loses a local facility. Ordinary, harmless folk have nowhere to go for a pint and a fag – other than at home of course. Some of that much vaunted social capital is lost. The football team folds – it was a PUB team after all. The gardening club slowly declines. Other groups become ever more cliquey. Why? Because a ban brought in to satisfy folk who never used pubs resulted in those pubs closing.

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