Everything is at risk

Oxfordshire County Council (OCC) is preparing for another round of cuts and seems to have forgotten that libraries are a statutory service. At a meeting yesterday Cllr Lawrie Stratford painted a bleak picture for services, using the phrase "Some services may have to be removed and we have to be upfront about that"

OCC designated 21 libraries non-statutory in the last round of cuts and supposedly saved 313k by cutting the staffing in these libraries. The decision was taken most undemocratically by David Camoron and the then leader of the council. Even the deputy leader of the council admitted the consultation was a sham. See here for the sorry history.

But despite the dodgy decision making and the fact it doesn't really save any money (they continue to ignore the costs) the direction of travel seems to be more volunteers in libraries, presumably making more or all libraries non-statutory or cutting the funding and staffing to the non-statutory libraries altogether.

The current leader of OCC was at No 10 today:

A good location to talk about the challenges for local government pic.twitter.com/m2b4iWihwy

— Ian Hudspeth (@ianhudspeth) May 27, 2015

I've blogged before about the ever increasing service support costs and yet again they've increased:

This time by £575,306, in one year far exceeding the supposed 313k savings. The council have said this is because the library service is taking a increased share of the fixed costs as other services have shrunk. I've no idea if this is true or not but you can throw as many volunteers at you want at services and sack the low paid library managers, it isn't going to solve the problem of increasing property costs every year. I've also blogged before about how OCC should be looking at shared services with BucksCC to pool this back office costs to save the front office. You'd expect the Tories as the party of supposed small government would have went here first but it seems clear the tail is still wagging the dog and the front line is yet again going to take the brunt of the cuts in the library service. It all looks very bleak and I feel sorry for the staff in the library service having to face this uncertainty yet again. Despite "everything is at risk" and how bleak things are, in the height of hypocrisy, the council still managed to vote for a 19% increase in allowances a few months ago. If things are so bad, I think that should also be on the table and the average cuts to services should be applied to the councillor "allowances".