Birmingham City Council has published revised plans today to make cuts to the City’s library service. The new plans include the removal of all BCC funding from 7 of the City’s libraries and places the future of a further 4 – pegged to become co-located, staffed by part-time BCC librarians but in non-BCC buildings – on questionable footing. The largest change is arguably the readjustment of opening hours to BCC libraries, which means 10 libraries previously slated to retain full-time opening hours will now all move to part-time opening hours.
A programme of budget cuts to libraries was set out in Labour’s 2024-2025 budget as part of an effort to make savings. The City will move from hosting 35 public libraries to 28, with hours to these slashed to as little as 14 hours a week.
Cllr Darius Sandhu (Con, Oscott), Shadow Cabinet Member for Digital, Culture, Heritage and Tourism, said:
It’s difficult to look at this restructured plan and not conclude that the Labour Administration are failing to get to grips with the issues this council faces. Our libraries offer a vital service across our City and this managed decline is unacceptable. It was also unnecessary – our alternative budget, costed and approved by the Council’s finance officers and the Commissioners as a viable alternative, would have kept a professionally staffed full-time library service right across the city in all 35 libraries. Labour councillors had the opportunity to vote for that alternative but chose not to. Even now, having heard residents’ views so clearly, rather than choosing to restore the funding to the service, they are fiddling around with opening hours to try to dress up this managed decline as some sort of transformation of the service. This is a Labour council that chose to spend £17.2m a year to fund the borrowing costs of an athletes’ village in Perry Barr that didn’t house a single athlete, yet has chosen not to spend £2.3m to protect a service so important to so many.
Cllr Robert Alden (Con, Erdington), Leader of the Opposition and Birmingham Local Conservatives, added:
As it stands, there will not be a single full-time library service in the City. It is astounding that after residents responded to the public consultation saying that libraries were vital public spaces and the cuts suggested were not tenable for their communities, the Labour Administration have overseen the drawing up of a plan that actually reduces the service across the city further. This is a clear attempt to slowly comatose the library service.
