Council bosses defend £473k cut to library budget

COUNCIL leaders have defended cutting library hours in some of South Gloucestershire’s most deprived neighbourhoods.

Cabinet members have rubberstamped plans to slash £273,000 from the authority’s libraries budget, which will see the district’s 12 branches shut for an extra 40 hours in total every week.

There will be a new weekly half-day closure at Filton, Hanham, Kingswood, Downend, Staple Hill, Cadbury Heath, Patchway and Winterbourne, while most will close earlier daily – including Bradley Stoke, Emersons Green, Thornbury and Yate – to give each the same weekday staffed opening hours of 10am to 5pm, plus three hours on Saturday.

Speaking at a South Gloucestershire Council meeting on Monday cabinet member for communities and local place Cllr Sean Rhodes said all £200,000 annual savings from dimming street lights were being used to minimise cuts to libraries. Lights will be dimmed to a quarter of their brightness from 11pm to 6am, under plans also approved at the meeting. The original budget proposals were to reduce library spending by £473,000 a year.

Cllr Rhodes said the smaller amount of savings needed, combined with feedback from a 12-week public consultation, meant the budget for books would go down by only half of the £50,000 initially planned and that all branches would have longer staffed hours than first anticipated.

But Cllr Liz Brennan (Conservative, Frenchay & Downend) told the Lib Dem/ Labour cabinet: “We accept the reduction in the library budget was something you inherited but it was this administration who took the option to cut the services in the ‘priority neighbourhoods.’”

Cllr Rhodes replied: “We have to balance the issue around footfall in different neighbourhoods, and actually the footfall for libraries is higher elsewhere than in ‘priority neighbourhoods.’ Disproportionately cutting hours at libraries with big footfall doesn’t necessarily make full sense.”

Asked whether the council was confident of fulfilling its legal duty of providing a comprehensive library service, following concerns from trade union Unison that the cuts would threaten this, Cllr Rhodes said: “Officers have been in regular contact with DCMS (Department for Culture, Media and Sport) to ensure we’re remaining compliant with our statutory responsibilities. The crucial thing to acknowledge is that with the initial proposal, the potential impact of these changes was far greater, and officers have worked really hard to come up with a solution with us to mitigate this.”