£11m repair works at city library given green light
MILLIONS of pounds worth of repairs to the Library of Birmingham have been approved after it was feared that without them it will soon be unsafe for people to occupy.
Last week the Post revealed that the library, which opened in 2013, risks becoming unsafe to use without £11 million in maintenance works over the next ten years.
While Birmingham’s most iconic building has been undergoing day-today maintenance totalling around £600,000 a year, it has yet to receive any cyclical maintenance for ‘large plant’ issues such as emergency lighting batteries, security systems, escalators, painting and decoration and glass failure and breakages. To fund the works the council will draw down from a cyclical maintenance fund set up when it was first built, currently totalling around £8 million.
However, Coun Ewan Mackey (Sutton Roughley), who has fought for similar maintenance works on the Sutton Coldfield library in the past, believes that leaving any kind of cyclical maintenance works seven years is a risk the council needn’t be taking.
He said: “I think the crime here with the library, which has won awards for its architecture and is only seven years old, is we are seeing headlines that it may not be safe for people to use it.
“Maintenance is something that has to be ongoing. I could name many buildings that we’ve come short for on maintenance. It’s a fiddly and annoying thing but it’s something that you’ve got to keep going.”
He added: “I think we really need to focus. This is the residents’ money we’re spending here and we need to make sure that we get the best value for it. And I think most people understand with their own properties that not doing maintenance is a false economy.
“I call on the council to make sure that we look after all the buildings, not just our libraries, and maintain them, because these are assets for our future and for our children.” Coun Jayne Francis, the Cabinet Member for Education, Skills and Culture, acknowledged that the council “could do better” when it comes to maintenance.
But she added that the council inherited much of the situation from the previous administration in 2012, calling it a “shocking” lack of investment.
“Of course we can always do better as far as maintenance is concerned, but I have to remind you that we inherited a libraries estate across the city which has been subject to a shocking lack of investment from the previous administration.
“So we are doing our absolute best to bring buildings up to speed with the available budgets that we’ve got and to maintain our libraries estate across the city, not just the Library of Birmingham but all our libraries.”