They would doubtless deny it, but today's release of a new set of figures from the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) looks like a textbook case of softening up the public for yet another fall of the axe.
The subject is our public libraries – which, to read the accompanying coverage, are in danger of falling into dusty decline. Apparently, only 12.8% of us made a monthly habit of visiting our local library last year, and just 40% of us went there at least once. The DCMS reckons that the number of weekly visitors to libraries has fallen by 32% in five years.
Cue the inevitable noises about greater use of volunteers and the possibility of moving book-lending services into pubs and shops (predictably enough, supermarkets are usually mentioned), as well as sad predictions about what is now likely to transpire. Over to the libraries campaigner, Tim Coates: "I believe we will lose between 600 to 1,000 libraries in the next 12-18 months and that may be only the beginning: we are seeing the destruction of the public library service."
Tangled up in the figures, however, are some far more complicated realities. Over the report's five-year timeframe, despite the fact that children's books account for only 1.6% of councils' library spend, visits among children aged 11-15 stayed pretty much the same, at 71.6%. Records for kids aged 5-11 only began in 2008 – but again, any decline was insignificant (the figure fell from 75.3% to 74.9%). You also wonder about the differences between broadbrush national figures and what's actually happening in particular areas – a very relevant question, given that libraries policy can vary wildly from council to council.
This much we know: in lean times, libraries are among the first services to feel the pinch, and councils in Wirral, Swindon and Warwickshire have already been busy attacking their services. By contrast, recent figures show library use going up in the London borough of Hillingdon, and Cumbria – partly because of the recession, partly because the people in charge understand that decline often has as much to do with supply as demand.
I tip my hat to the Observer's Rachel Cooke and her brilliant 2009 piece about the state of our libraries. As she pointed out, "in 1996/7 there were 92.3m books available for lending in the UK; in 2007/8 that figure fell to 75.8m. The result of this is that fewer people borrow books – at some councils the number of book loans to adults has fallen below 2.5 a year – at which point it is very easy for a council to claim a library is poorly used and should be closed down." What she revealed about Hillingdon proved that the reverse applies and if you increase the number of books available, people will come: from 2007 onwards, 64,000 new books were introduced and borrowing figures went up fivefold.
Therein lies a fantastically important lesson: that for all the importance of internet access and "information hubs", and a deafening noise about allowing in Starbucks, or taking libraries into Tesco, a handful of facts join together to prove something beyond doubt. Millions of us still read books, and use libraries. Our children certainly do. And if we hold fast to the idea that libraries have to be lovingly cared for and decently resourced, the idea of inexorable decline can be contested.
It's simple enough, though the people at the top seem rather lost – as ever – in mysterious wonkspeak. This, for example, is from the DCMS's announcement of the first 10 areas to be co-opted into a new "future libraries programme", which bigs up the idea of borrowing books as an essential part of the "big society", and says this: "The programme promises to build momentum on the ideas that have been generated and spread learning between library authorities to achieve cost savings, new partnerships and governance models, and to take advantage of digital opportunities."
I'm not sure what this means, though it perhaps brings to mind a recent, much written about report by the consultancy firm KPMG, which reflected one of the big society's biggest ideas by praising the plan of communities somehow running their own libraries, which would "save large amounts of money on overskilled paid staff, poor use of space and unnecessary stock". The words are chilling, but also borderline moronic. They also conjure up the likely future: dwindling numbers of books, clueless staff, and further decline. We seem to be falling into an archetypal vicious circle; the cost, needless to say, will be paid in ignorance. Clever, eh?
