Stuart Hoddinott is a researcher for the Institute for Government’s public services team. Here he explains why a profile-raising performance from public libraries during the pandemic won’t save them now, and how they might change that. This article was orginally published in CILIP's 2023 Annual Buyers Guide

THE Institute for Government’s public services team puts together an Annual Performance Tracker which tracks nine public services: hospitals; general practice; adult social care; children’s social care; schools; neighbourhood services; police; courts and prisons.

Stuart was one of the authors of three of these chapters. This includes neighbourhood services which covers public libraries and other services such as planning, regulatory services, road maintenance and waste.

Stuart says the tracker “is a look at how services are performing given the levels of spending that is put into them. We use publicly available data and supplement that with qualitative interviews about what is going on in these services.”

What does he know?

The report mentions libraries several times, often in positive ways. It commented on the library response to Covid saying that some services like “food safety, health and safety, and trading standards… had to cease almost all activity… Others – for example, libraries – continued to operate, though using novel or previously underutilised means.”

And in relation to the current cost of living crisis the tracker said: “Authorities that we spoke to are planning to extend service provision – for example, longer opening hours in libraries – to help communities struggling with the coming winter crisis.”

Lost in the crowd?

Stuart is not a public library expert, the sector is just one of the many that he looks at. But with a broad view across these sectors, he can assess the relative position and profile of the public library sector alongside other services. For example, did libraries really stand out during the pandemic?

Stuart confirms the finding in the report, that they did, although he says they were not alone in re-inventing how they delivered services. Based on the many qualitative interviews he carried out for the Performance Tracker with local authority officers who “were not from the library sector”, he says: “For local authority officers, the main interaction with libraries during the pandemic was as a resource they could draw on. They redeployed a lot of library staff to frontline Covid services.”

But he said their entrepreneurialism was also noticed, adding: “Libraries received praise for how flexible they were, how they changed the type of service they delivered and how well staff transitioned to other services. That’s why libraries feature on the radar of local authority officers.”

Good news?

Is this higher profile as positive as it sounds? Stuart says: “My impression was that everyone I spoke to was genuinely concerned about the cost-of-living crisis and what it would do to residents. They were very interested in helping where they could. And they do see libraries as one of the only levers they can pull. Yes, that’s very encouraging for libraries, but it’s about what happens when that butts up against the reality of finance pressure. “I think every local authority we spoke to mentioned some sort of warm banking and often linked that to libraries and keeping libraries open. It was also linked to internet provision. They see these as good ways of combating the cost-of-living crisis for their residents.”

Bad news

But this probably won’t be enough. “The issue is how a local authority officer’s good intentions compete with budget constraints and finance officers during a crisis. Will they be able to follow through on their good intentions? In January, when they have a massive hole in the budget that has to be filled before the end of March are they really going to prioritise warm spaces and wifi? I honestly don’t know.”

He says that experience shows that cuts tend to happen in the same places: “Public libraries were the worst cut that we analysed and probably the worst cut across entire local authority provided services. Between 2009/10 and 2020/21 spending on libraries fell by about 48 per cent.”

These cuts were disproportionately high compared to cuts of about a third in local authority core spending, according to Stuart. Worryingly, he thinks politicians will probably select the same targets again, saying: “Experience says that when local authorities are under funding pressure they will look to cut services that are either not statutory, or not acute and also have low local political salience. Unfortunately, (despite libraries having some statutory protection) they still tick all three of those boxes, and I suspect local authorities will continue to cut library spending if they do suffer financially in the coming year.

An example was the joint letter from leaders of Kent and Hampshire County Councils to the department saying unless we have an increase in the funding or a change in the scope of services provided by local authorities we’re going to go bust. And they specifically pulled out public libraries’ statutory protection in that letter, [asking government] to think about changing the statutory responsibility for providing things like libraries. So yes, I suspect that things like libraries will probably suffer again.”

Low protection

Can the funding priority of public libraries be improved? One way to assess this is to look at the three measures Stuart suggests for gauging funding priorities. The least effective funding protection – one that public librarians are already keenly aware of – is the legal protection under the 1964 Public Libraries and Museums Act. Stuart says: “Within neighbourhood services there are things like homelessness and concessionary bus passes for seniors, services which local authorities have a legal duty to provide. Yes, they also have a statutory duty to supply a library service too, but it is very vague and could be interpreted as anything you want. It means that when councils are forced to spend on statutory services, libraries have less rigorous duty. So that’s one factor.”

Low salience

“The other is the political salience. If you look at the areas that were relatively protected during the 2010s, they were road maintenance, waste collections, planning applications. They were all cut, but cut far less because they were all politically salient. They are areas that councillors get complaints about in their emails. Complaints about potholes, bin collections and planning applications that have taken nine weeks, not the promised eight weeks. High political salience diverts attention to those areas and they receive more funding than areas like libraries, museums, community centres.”

Stuart does point out that this lack of salience may not reflect the views of the community, only the views of those who communicate with their councillors. He suggests that the voices of library users aren’t heard. “It is sad because libraries provide very important services that are massively appreciated and also benefit some of the worst off in local authorities. These are people whose voices aren’t necessarily the ones who get into the local paper and who aren’t likely to kick up a big fuss with their local councillor. That has unfortunate ramifications for spending positions.”

Acute pressure

His other measure for funding priority is the extent to which services see rises in demand during a crisis. Many of these services – like health and homelessness – are already covered by higher statutory protection. Even with this legal protection some acute services will struggle: “There is also a massive workforce crisis in adult social care and their costs rising with huge provider instability in the market. It’s a perfect storm of problems for local authorities this winter and I imagine they are going to be in a very difficult financial position over the next financial year.”

Stuart pointed to the Institute for Government’s brief analysis of Jeremy Hunt’s autumn statement which, while delivering more money than expected for adult social care and giving new powers to councils to raise council tax, said: “the most deprived authorities will see the smallest uplifts.” It also pointed out that the worst pain has been delayed until after the next general election and that “£22b of cuts across all day-to-day spending have been pencilled in for 2025/26 to 2027/28”.

But alongside the funding pressure, Stuart says that inflation has added more new pressures on acute services. While councils are seeing rises in their own immediate direct costs for things like energy bills and wages, so are their providers from the commercial sector.

“A lot of providers are saying ‘we have to uprate the amount that we charge you or we’re going to hand back contracts’ and we’ve heard it’s as brutal as some saying ‘you need to pay now or we won’t collect bins next week.’ Authorities are often in a very weak position because it’s impossible to go through a re-tendering process that quickly and are left to the whims of providers.”

Ways through?

Stuart says libraries have already shown they can boost their political salience: “There have been examples of high-profile campaigns to save libraries, sometimes with celebrities involved, and those have often proven to be most successful. There is definitely a case that if you increase the salience you increase the political pain for councillors in cutting libraries and they will shy away from it ultimately.”

And while he is unwilling to say whether councils will follow through on their ambitions to help their residents in the cost-of-living crisis, he acknowledges that if libraries are at the forefront of local authority ‘warm spaces’ provision, then a cold winter might place them on the “acute” service funding hierarchy. “Yes, if the winter is warm, libraries might not get their chance to shine. But if you’re thinking of changing the service that libraries deliver, to make them more relevant or more salient, one thing I would stress here is that local authority decisions are not monolithic. What one authority thinks is important another might not, based on a range of different factors, not least the personalities of the councillors, so there is no one-size-fits-all. So, yes it’s interesting to think ‘what could libraries do differently?’.”

Data

One note from Stuart, that may one day be exploitable by library services, is that there is data showing what is happening. Despite the sector’s frustrations with it, Stuart says: “The CIPFA dataset about libraries is some of the best data we have. The story in other local authority services is a severe lack of data available for analysis. In a project that we published earlier this year we tried to get a performance indicator for every single line of local authority spending. In the end we were only able to account for about 30 per cent, with 70 per cent having no quality indicator, so we have no idea how well our money is being spent and what the outcomes are.

“In terms of other comparable services, we have no idea how many museums there are now compared to 2009/10, we have no idea how money is being spent on open spaces by local authorities, we don’t know how many people attend leisure centres, we don’t know how many people visit community centres.

“The gaps in local authority data are just enormous. As someone who has used a lot of local authority data it’s a joy to work with library data, but I agree it doesn’t capture everything.” However, 20/21 is “far more patchy because local authorities and libraries were focused on dealing with the pandemic than providing data returns… that makes it impossible to compare year-on-year… we’ve effectively lost a year of comparable data. It’s difficult now to say what happened to library provision during the pandemic.”