For Keith and Dave

Here is the full costings for the volunteers and the numbers. It isn't precise because OCC cannot confirm who has to pay for the CRB, or if the cuts are on the opening hours or the staffing hours. But I think to use their jargon "the numbers are robust". Other groups did their own calculations separately and got very similar numbers to what I came up with. Also worth noting the hours for volunteers we have used matched what the draft volunteer job specification says on 2-3 hours per volunteer. Even if these projections are 50% wrong, to proceed with this is madness.

The costings:

OCC has also indicated that they would pay for volunteer travel to training courses (although not day to day expenses) and this would also increase the costs, eating further into the already minus number "savings".

The model was devised after consultation with volunteering organisations and those who regularly use volunteers.  Based upon two hours per week (as per volunteer job description) x the number of hours to be covered in the two thirds model x 2 for volunteers to work together when no council employee on duty.

 This was calculated for Wychwood and then the required volunteers per opening hours mapped onto the other libraries based upon their unfunded opening hours.

Over 1000! Other library groups have independently done their own calculations and some were slightly higher, some slightly lower but all ended up with roughly the same figures.

These are pasted in as pictures but unlike OCC who only release PDF's of spreadsheets I will put links at the end for the xls. 

One easy suggestion would be to have big society cleaners in every library, this means the cleaning contract would not be required and OCC would save £247,277.68. Not only that the expensive costs above on CRB and Health and Safety wouldn't be required because the cleaning could be done when the libraries are closed. It means everyone wins (apart from the cleaning company) and you can say they big society has won too. You can still look at the back office sharing, introducing Costa coffee for extra revenue, look for more efficiences in the 3.1 million internal recharge and still save all the front line libraries, just think you would be heroes!

Otherwise this proposal as it stands is so ill-conceived and the consultation so badly managed I doubt OCC would be up to managing a thousand volunteers without hiring dozens more staff in the corporate core. Even the logistics of providing training for all these volunteers would create such a bureaucracy that it makes me think this whole scheme was dreamt up by Sir Humphrey himself.

This has the cleaning costs, they are just for cleaning as I have seen the actual figures for Wychwood.

https://docs.google.com/leaf?id=0B6dU0yhpP-MUNmY5NjQyYjItZWFlNS00OWVkLTkzZDEtMWVhMTMwZGI3ZGYw&hl=en_US

Here is the full volunteer costings and numbers:

https://docs.google.com/leaf?id=0B6dU0yhpP-MUNjQ5MDY3OTEtY2QxOC00NWQ1LTgyOTEtZDFmZTRmY2RlNjRj&hl=en_US