27th July 2011

BURTON BRADSTOCK: Library volunteers will soldier on despite 'appalling' decision

DETERMINED volunteers at Burton Bradstock library have vowed to carry on despite being “appalled” by the Dorset County Council decision to withdraw its funding.

Dorset County Council members voted 21 to 20 in favour of cutting the funding to nine libraries, including Burton Bradstock, offering them up for communities to take over and run independently.

The alternative proposal, which involved maintaining all 34 libraries with cuts shared across the board, lost out by a single vote with members claiming it would drastically weaken the library service and simply delay the inevitable.

Chairman of the Trustees of Burton Bradstock Library, Bob Hynds, said: “I’m appalled by what they did, there was a perfectly viable solution that would have saved all 34 libraries but they were insistent on choosing this option.

“Burton Bradstock is a slightly unique case and to be honest and it won’t make a great deal of difference to us. We beat them down so they now have to provide books and terminals and we just have to takeover the building and the running costs which was something we had planned to do anyway to keep the building and to stop it from being sold off.

“Burton will go on more or less as it is but for the other eight the timescale is going to make it very difficult to get in volunteers and get them trained. I’m not happy about the decision at all but for the residents of Burton Bradstock at least we will continue to run as normal.”

The decision was taken to help the library service find savings of more than £800,000 in 2011/12, while maintaining an effective geographical spread of library buildings in areas where they are most heavily used.

The council is proposing to provide books, computers, self-service facilities and staffing expertise to support those nine local communities if they want to take over responsibility for their library building.
Campaign Group Ad Lib said they were “gutted to lose” and will now be fighting on behalf of the nine community libraries who have had their funding cut.

“We are down but we are not out,” said Graham Lee, chairman of Ad Lib.

“We will now fight to get the best deal we can for the libraries the council wants to wash its hands of. The main thing we will be arguing for is that any community which takes over the running of its library from the council should still be covered by the1964 Libraries Act.

“The council’s officers are telling us that, as voluntary bodies, we would not get that protection, but we’re not buying that. We have no confidence that without the law behind us, Dorset County Council would continue to supply us with the books we need to survive.”

Mr Lee added that Ad Lib would now be meeting with its legal advisors to decide how to proceed if any legal challenge to the council’s decision were decided on.

Council leader Angus Campbell said the decision had not been easy.
“We know that libraries are very important to many people, and this process has quite understandably aroused a lot of strong feeling,” he said.

“We have improved the community offer and increased the number of libraries to be retained by the council.

“We must ensure that the library service is sustainable into the future, and I believe retaining all 34 libraries would have seriously damaged that approach – bleeding the service dry for a short-term fix. It would have greatly increased the likelihood of having to revisit this subject in the next couple of years, and find even more savings. Local government funding has undergone a seismic shift, and we must adapt to that.

“The approach we have taken will help us maintain a strong service, providing a good spread of libraries across the county and mobile libraries to continue serving isolated rural areas. At the same time, we will offer extensive support to those communities where funding will be withdrawn, giving them the chance not only to maintain independent libraries but also make better use of buildings which are currently open for just a few hours each week.”

The eight other libraries which will have their funding cut are Charmouth, Chickerell, Colehill, Corfe Castle, Portland Underhill, Puddletown, Stalbridge and Wool.

Talks will now take place with the nine affected communities about the community take-over option, before the changes are implemented next year.

BURTON BRADSTOCK: Library volunteers will soldier on despite 'appalling' decision

Comments

Add new comment