Some good news comes from
the LibrariesWest consortium, which links Somerset
and the four unitary authorities in what used to be Avon. The public library services of Dorset and Poole will be joining the consortium in June. As a result, users will be able to access over
150 libraries ‘coast to coast’, from the Bristol Channel to the English Channel, using a single library card. Items can be reserved, borrowed, renewed and
returned at any LibrariesWest library regardless of where borrowed from. LibrariesWest is also introducing a shared computer
system to manage loans and stock, offering online searches of a unified
catalogue of 2.5 million items.
The London regime’s expectation is that councils
will increasingly work together to reduce costs, including through pooling
their buying power. Financial pressures
and technical changes mean that it’s happening across a wide range of services,
from police and fire to archives and museums to smaller councils pooling back-office
functions like audit, payroll, procurement and IT.
Costs could be reduced and
effectiveness improved much more rapidly, and with much less pain, if Wessex
had an elected assembly to co-ordinate all these ad hoc efforts. For example, the Welsh Government’s National
Procurement Service has led the commissioning of a single library management
system for all 22 public library authorities in Wales. This is but one of its many initiatives,
designed to empower local economies as well as cut costs across the whole
public sector. An assembly in Wessex would
have its own ‘invest-to-save’ budget to spend on driving forward regional
priorities, which could be very different from those that London thinks best
for us. Wessex
needs to be free of interference from Whitehall
departments that, by imposing ideological solutions through institutional
silos, only gets in the way of sensible answers to challenging questions.
