He asks about the attentions of the management of Sheep City, our arm's-length, not-part-of-the-council-for-VAT-purposes lesiure, arts. culture and dried sandwiches centre. When it was set up it was made abundantly clear to anybody who would listen that the Library Service wasn't wanted on board. Now we're led to believe that 'exploratory talks' are in the offing. Ken scoffs at this, reckoning that any time there are 'exploratory talks' there's a done deal under the table.
"When our leisure trust was set up they couldn't do enough to keep their distance from us," he tells me. "Now the council's spent a pile of money doing up the library buildings we're suddenly attractive. We've been getting good performance figures, too, and that's got everything to do with the fact we're not constantly bleeding resources to prop up the leisure services any more.
"It's no coincidence, of course, that the latest takeover manoeuvres are happening at the same time as the budget reports suggest you'd get the same income stream as the golf club if you spent the weekend flushing £50 notes down the lavatory."
I do hope he's wrong. There aren't many examples of this being put into practice and I'd hate for us to be one of them. I don't see any great merit in our moving from a failed service delivery model to one that ensures the destruction of the service.
6 comments:
Flushing £50 notes down the lavatory could be advertised as a retro, 1960s-style "happening" at the library, and you get provide free LSD and fly Yoko Ono in from New York to be the compere - I'm sure her fees are very reasonable.
Thought library was being merged with the job centre...or was it Family Services? Or was that a different initiative.. oh I am confused...again
Does this mean you'd have to wear a shell suit or other leisure wear? This may be worth seeing.
Gadjo: not possible outside the reaches of the nationals, sadly. Not that we've ever investigated, of course...
Macy: no, you're right on all accounts: everybody's being merged into everything else to provide "a single customer experience." This usually involves hiring any seven of a couple of hundred management consultancy companies to explain why public service should be provided by pan-generic specialists.
Madame DF: not even in jest, deary, not even in jest.
I'm a bit of a radical where Libraries are concerned. In most places, they seem to suffer dreadfully when under the 'control' of local Councils: too much temptation to trim their operating budgets when overruns occur elsewhere. I feel they belong to the community, and as such should have much more community involvement at the top management level; a sort of Board of Local Trustees. The key thing is, in my opinion, that here is an area where legislation SHOULD be involved; it should be manadatory that every town over x thousand people should have £y thousand set aside for a Library - and that this should be untappable by other services such as Tourist Board, Swimming Pool, Concert Hall or whoever!
Affer: I'm definitely with you in theory. Unfortunately, I've had bad experiences with 'friends' groups who haven't necessarily had the needs of the wider community on their minds when they've made their demands. And too often, "having a library" turns out to mean "having a library building and we won't worry too much about resourcing any of the services in there." In the States, when it works it works excellently; when it doesn't it's awful.
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