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 author- ities 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 con- tracts’ and we’ve heard it’s as brutal as some saying ‘you need to pay now or we won’t collect bins next week.’ Author- ities 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 defi- nitely 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 acknowl- edges that if libraries are at the fore- front 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 coun-
9
cillors, 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 anal- ysis. In a project that we published earlier this year we tried to get a performance indicator for every single line of local au- thority 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 com- pare 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.” BG
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