Phil Taylor

Tonight’s Northfield library consultation meeting was packed. Something like 75 seats were laid out. All were filled. Add in the number standing and the total number was about 140 after the last 10 or so had crammed in after council leader Julian Bell’s speech.

Last night I suggested Cllr Bell’s “I didn’t come in to politics to do this” speech lasted 20 minutes. Tonight I timed it at 8.5 minutes. Clearly it only felt like 20 minutes last night. Rather like last night a number of Labour councillors turned up to defend the indefensible and offer moral support to their beleagured cabinet colleagues. Cllr Manro from Greenford North, Cllr Wall from Hobbayne in Hanwell and Cllr Dheer from Dormers Wells in Southall.

Walpole residents and local blow hards, Judy and Arthur Breens, spoke loudly and insistently for their genius idea of allocating the total funds of both Northfield and Walpole ward forums in perpetuity to funding the library. Apart from the technical issue that this money is largely capital and not revenue, it would mean that nothing would be available for local parks, transport and environment projects ever again.

The new administration got a huge amount of flack for the Southall car park with one questioner again asking whether Labour couldn’t “put your car park on hold?” in order to save the libraries. Leader Bell proceeded to get a bit emotional at this point and suggest that the previous administration had “taken £13.5 million out of Southall”. This is nonsense. The council sold a row of shops that it owned. A corporate asset not a public one. There was some bitterness from the shop keepers that the council did not give them premises at a silly price but the rest of the borough was well served by this transaction. This is Labour’s “asset stripping” which they use to justify building a £5.5 million car park in Southall, a project that will increase Southall’s congestion rather than fix it.

Cllr Dheer got the chance to defend to the Southall car park from the floor without declaring himself as a Southall Labour councillor. When Northfield councillor Mark Reen spoke following the anonymous Dheer he was mildly rebuked by Labour’s Cllr Johnson for having the temerity to speak as a councillor.

Much of the meeting was devoted to the administration pleading with the audience to volunteer as individuals or organisations. One lady suggested her organisation might be interested. On the whole the mood of the meeting was skeptical. Cllr Bell suggested that “Northfield is an area that would want to volunteer to support its library”. Apparently he is not making this suggestion in Labour heartlands of Acton, Greenford and Southall. He did say though that the Labour chief whip had suggested making volunteering in libraries compulsory for Labour councillors. I am not sure that Labour gets volunteering!

I managed to pop up and suggest that the council might like to look at staffing and work practices across the whole library service which is the only fair and sensible way to trim the library service. Libraries such as Central (26 FTE), Acton (12.3 FTE), Southall (12.6 FTE) and Greenford (10.8 FTE) are no more productive than the smaller libraries in spite of automation. We should also look at staff terms and conditions as you can’t really run a retail operation on 35 hour work weeks. Another idea would be single-handed working for smaller libraries. Cllr Bell was at pains to confirm that this will be done as a part of a whole service review. I suspect that he has been badly advised by a service which is more interested in doing things the same old way than serving its users.

One idiot got very worked up over the banks and politicians in general and managed to throw the radio mike at the council staff trying to run the meeting. Apart from that it was a reasonably polite meeting that allowed Northfield to show the administration that it will not be short changed.

The Northfield library consultation meeting takes place tonight at 7pm. It takes place at the Northfield Community Centre NOT the library itself. The council leader, Cllr Julian Bell, finance head, Cllr Yvonne Johnson, and the councillor in charge of the libraries, Cllr Kamaljit Dhindsa, will be there.

It seems like only yesterday I was reporting that visits had increased 65% after the library had re-opened in August 2007, see here.

I expect that it will be another packed session so get there early. Northfields Community Centre, 71a Northcroft Road, Ealing, W13 9SS. Map below.

There was a big turnout tonight for the Hanwell library consultation meeting.

There were about 70 seats laid out, all full plus another 40 or so standing, so maybe 110 in all. To confuse matters a protest march of trade union types set off from Ealing Hospital and arrived at the meeting just before it started, maybe some 60 shown in the picture above. Most of these stayed for the meeting and are included in the 110-ish.

There was a good turnout of councillors including all six Hanwell councillors except Labour’s Yoel Gordon.

The meeting lasted an hour and a half and started off with council leader Julian Bell doing his 20 minute “I didn’t come in to politics to do this” speech. He talked about the £65 million savings the council needs to make without explaining that £7.3 million of that was his own growth (decisions to increase expenditure) and that the previous Conservative administration had taken out £60 million relatively painlessly in the previous four years.

A couple of factoids emerged during the course of the evening. The consultation is costing £12,800 in external costs. Cllr Bell indicated that they were looking for £500K of savings from libraries.

Cllr Bell reported that they had researched the council’s legal position regarding the Carnegie library bequest and that “there is no restriction on our ability to dispose of the library”. He went on to say “We have actively searched for documentation”. Such comments will make people ask if this expensive consultation is real.

Elthorne LibDem councillor Nigel Bakhai wanted to better understand the capital cost of putting Hanwell library right but just got a cheap shot from Cllr Bell suggesting that he should write to his party leader. The room was not impressed.

When challenged by Conservative Hobbayne councillor Colm Costello about the rather stark juxtaposition of a Hanwell library closure against a new build multi-storey car park in Southall Cllr Johnson talked about the later being a manifesto commitment and said “We are not going to give up the idea of a car park in Southall”. Costello reasonably asked why the Southall car park could not be delayed to save the libraries.

The two Labour Hobbayne councillors present kept their questions to themselves. Two ex-Labour councillors spoke for the library and one failed Labour candidate asked about alternative provision on the Uxbridge Road. None got much of an answer.

The low point of the evening was the Unison rep for the library service, Steven Ellis, suggesting that the council just overspends. Ellis is a Socialist Worker Party activist and supporter of direct action. He was put down by Cllr Johnson, the Labour finance chief, who didn’t want to see the council run by its chief accountant in the event that she failed to set a balanced budget.

Being a bigger meeting than last week’s Perivale meeting there was less opportunity for constructive debate. It was too much of a statement making exercise on all sides. That said the level of public anger was clear.

The Hanwell library consultation meeting takes place tonight at 7pm. It takes place at the William Hobbayne Centre NOT the library itself. The council leader, Cllr Julian Bell, finance head, Cllr Yvonne Johnson, and the councillor in charge of the libraries, Cllr Kamaljit Dhindsa, will be there to face the music. The volume will be rather high if I know Hanwell.

Get there early. William Hobbayne Centre, Lower Boston Road, Hanwell, W7 2NP. Map below.

1. Hanwell library only employs 2.9 staff.
2. It is very cheap to run – only £83K per annum would be saved by closing it.
3. Council officers asked the Conservatives if they wanted to close it in 2007. We said no.
4. The library service costs £6.7 million so the saving would be 1.2% of the library budget.
5. The library is very dilapidated and needs £1,106,400 to fix it.
6. In the Conservative 2010 manifesto we promised to modernise Hanwell library.
7. The new Labour council want to spend £5.5 million providing 100-200 car park places in Southall – 5 times the amount required to fix up Hanwell library.
8. Hanwell has an identity of its own – it needs its own library.
9. The book buying budget is less than 10% of libraries spending and should be left alone. There is no point in keeping the buildings and staff and not buying books.
10. There are other ways of finding savings in the library service if required, for instance:
    • The library service employs 125 FTE altogether.
    • There are 7 senior managers in the library service who report up through three more layers of management.
    • The libraries back office still employs 21.5 FTE.
    • Ealing Central library employs 27 FTE.

If you accept that the libraries budget needs to take its share of the pain, which I do, you do not have to accept that libraries should be closed. First off a fair share of the pain is more like 10% and not the 30% as stated in the preamble to the libraries consultation:

Due to cuts to our government funding, Ealing Council needs to save £65million over the next three years. This is approximately 30% of the money that the council has available to spend on its services.

The first part of this statement is only partially true and the second part is nonsense. The council and its officers should be ashamed of itself for making this stuff up. I will be debunking this 30% figure in a future posting.

The council’s approach to saving money in the libraries budget has been put forward by libraries officers and it betrays their agenda which is to have fewer libraries with lots senior of “professional” staff. This agenda is about making career paths for professional librarians rather than providing the libraries that users want in hard times.

The library service is probably the least reformed and most old-fashioned service that the council runs. It has a massive workforce of 125 full-time equivalent (FTE) staff. They all work to the council’s standard terms and conditions, see here. This means that they only do 35 hour weeks and senior staff have 33 days of holidays every year. It is very hard to run what is essentially a retail business on this basis. When I suggested during the debate on libraries at full council last week that we should consider single-handed working in the smaller libraries, for at least part of the week, some idiot on the Labour benches shouted “health and safety”. There is no record of safety issues in libraries. Do people run laundrettes and small shops double handed? No. There is no sense in it. In communities such as Perivale, Northolt, Northfield and Hanwell we are asking small shopkeepers to run their businesses single handed so that they can pay their taxes whilst the council robs their areas of footfall because it won’t run the library single handed.

It is typical of this service that they have lined up Northolt Leisure Centre Library for the chop. This is the cheapest library in the borough in terms of cost per book actually borrowed and yet has some of the longest opening hours at 48 hours per week. The library service dislike it because it so efficiently run by staff from Active Ealing (the council team who run many of our sports facilities). Active Ealing has a much more can do attitude than the hidebound library staff. This is certainly the model that will be used in Acton when the swimming pool and library are re-provided yet the library service wants to kill off the model they will be copying.

The Northolt Leisure Centre Library demonstrates convincingly that there is another way of running libraries and that money can be saved whilst services are preserved.

Labour’s soon to be ditched housing supremo, Hitesh Tailor, is a bit of a comedian. He laments the fact that his own party failed to raise housing as an issue at the council meeting last night. Labour asked questions on national issues such as the spending review, the 2011 budget, the NHS and the march on 26th March. They tabled motions on the budget and policing. If Cllr Withani wants to have housing discussed at a council meeting perhaps he could persuade his colleagues to raise it? Labour don’t seem to want to talk about Ealing much right now at council meetings. They seem to prefer opposition.

In the meantime I asked him three weeks ago could he tell us how many people lost their homes as a result of Labour’s James Purnell limiting LHA to the five room rate in April 2009 as a result of the Acton Afghan case. Labour limits LHA and it is OK. No comment from Withani. The Tories do it and we are hypocrites. Sorry but I think Withani needs to look up the meaning of the word hypocrite!

Tonight will see the first of four library consultation meetings for each of the four libraries that the Labour administration has put under threat. Tonight is Perivale’s turn. Council leader Julian Bell, finance head Yvonne Johnson and the councillor in charge of libraries, Kamaljit Dhindsa, have all promised to be there. The meeting is at 7pm at Perivale Primary School, Federal Road, Perivale UB6 7AP. This is some way from the actual library, map below.