Toby Young’s piece in the latest issue of the Spectator magazine captures one of
the problems facing the Big Society. It’s not that people don’t want to donate their time to fill in the cracks left by the cuts – it’s that they’re often blocked from
doing so. Toby highlights the case of Kensal Rise Library, which a local group of volunteers had hoped to save from the axe. But local council chiefs have hardly greeted their plan for running the
library with enthusiasm. As Toby puts it:
“On Monday, the council produced its considered response in the form of a 178-page ‘supplement’ to … well, it doesn’t say. In addition to having no table of contents and no index, it has no title. It’s just a ‘supplement’. After wading through it, I discovered the [volunteers’] proposals are dealt with in ‘Appendix Six’ and it reads like a parody of small-minded local government obstruction. First, it sets out the seven criteria by which all of the proposals are to be judged — and it goes without saying that none of the groups had the slightest awareness of these until now. (Number four is fairly typical: ‘The extent to which the proposal promotes inclusion and diversity.’) Then it painstakingly goes through each of the proposals, including the one from the Friends of Kensal Rise Library, and dismisses them all on the grounds that they fail to comply with these criteria.”
But it’s not just the council. A local Labour MP, Glenda Jackson – who might have welcomed her constituents’ initiative – has said this:
“volunteers could not cope with the complexity of running public libraries with no funding from councils.”
She argues that given the various issues involved in running a library, such as the maintenance of an historic building, volunteers can’t possibly step up to the plate. Fair enough, but where does this thinking stop? If MPs and local authorities are set against voluntarism, then that same voluntarism will never take root. Glenda Jackson was unavailable for comment when I called her office today, but Coffee House hopes she will think again about The Friends of Kensal Rise Library group and their proposal. Then, perhaps, Brent council might do likewise when they meet on Monday.
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