Army of 50,000 volunteers are keeping libraries open after £300m cuts take toll
A STAGGERING £300million has been wiped from library budgets since the turn of the decade, figures have revealed.
Councils have shut 700 libraries since 2010, with the pace of closures accelerating last year when budgets were slashed by £30million, forcing 127 to close.
Data published by the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government shows that council cuts have been most severely felt by librarians, with more than 1,500 losing their jobs over the past two years.
Volunteers are now increasingly being left to stack shelves and are being relied on to keep branches open.
Other sites now only open for restricted hours.
The Chartered Institute of Public Finance and Accountancy, which conducts an annual survey of libraries, said that 50,000 volunteers had to put in almost 1.8 million hours last year to keep services going.
The Daily Express is continuing to lobby for a national rethink with our Save Our Libraries crusade. Last night campaigners called for urgent action to be taken. Ian Anstice, editor of Public Libraries News, said: “The public library system has had the deepest cuts in its history since 2010.
“Many library services have seen their budgets halved, or worse, in that time, with the Government being responsible for both cutting national funding to councils and refusing to intervene when the inevitable happens and libraries, rendered defenceless, are targeted.
“This has caused not only wellpublicised closures but also a hollowing out of many libraries, with fewer staff and books and shorter opening hours.
“This means many people, including children, have poor or no access to books, computers, study spaces or expert help.
“This in turn contributes long-term inequality.”
Laura Swaffield, chairwoman of the charity The Library Campaign, also called for action.
She said: “It’s time to wake up and see that public libraries are an investment, not a luxury. The pay-off is huge.
“Libraries give local, easy access to information and support. That to underpins the work of many other services, including health, education, social services, employment, youth services, even crime prevention.
“They act as social glue. “People of every age and background go to the library, share the space, interact with each other.
“In many areas, it’s the only place left that qualifies as this kind of public space.
“In a nation often so that’s beyond price.”
More than eight million Britons are active borrowers from the country’s remaining 3,600 libraries.
Some 30,000 people, including authors JK Rowling, Philip Pullman and Malorie Blackman, have signed a petition calling on divided, the Government to ring-fence library funding. In a reply to the petition, the Government blamed councils for the closures and said that ring-fencing was inappropriate.
But Gerald Vernon-Jackson, of the Local Government Association, said: “Councils value libraries and want to do everything they can to keep them open despite experiencing a fall in core government funding of nearly £15billion over the past decade.
“Financial pressures and a rising demand for services such as homelessness support, children’s services and adult social care have forced councils to divert funding from other vital services, including for libraries, arts programmes and parks.”