Ah'll buy thee a better pair tomorrow

"Better Stock Better Libraries" being called in by DCMS for a risk-assessment ought to be giving us a little breathing space to worry about some of the other stuff going on around our ears. We're not convinced that there's that much scope for this particular model's providing us with greater efficiencies: we're lean to the point of emaciation and the BSBL model appears to shift most of the local administrative overheads onto the front line, where we're struggling to keep doors open at all, let alone do the receipt processing on top of all else.

We're not going to be having a breathing space: Mary comes back from a meeting to say that one of the larger partners in our buying consortium wants us all to carry on regardless, arguing that as it's got a big procurement team we should all outsource the work to them. As Noreen says:

"If they're so damned well-managed and efficient they wouldn't have that sort of over-capacity in the first place."