The mountain laboured and brought forth a mouse. But not a very nice or useful mouse.

The Department of Culture, Media and Sport has at last produced a ‘policy statement’ entitled ‘The Modernisation review of public libraries’. There is little radical and little of benefit to the public, indeed precious little modernisation. The library establishment and quangoland by contrast have much to be pleased about.

The paper contains a long list of instructions for local authorities and even specifically for local authority chief executives: no role for councillors here. Local authorities must set flexible opening hours to suit the needs of local people (as opposed to deliberately trying to annoy them?), think of innovate ways of generating improvements, maximise efficiencies in the stock supply chain and improve their ability to use and evaluate evidence.

Local authority chief executives are told they should champion the partnership agenda – DCMS seems to see this as a new idea.
There is to be a ‘new’ strategic body for the libraries sector – apparently MLA plus – which will improve leadership. No role here again for councillors, the LGA or the IDeA, all of which have a proven track record on leadership and peer challenge. Instead we get an appointed quango, folding in the hopelessly supplier-led Advisory Council for Libraries, to ensure that it is the librarian rather than the elector or the user who is in charge.

Local authorities are warned that the process of government intervention is to be clarified. In essence there will be more central intervention – the Government continues to applaud the disgraceful Charteris report into the Wirral, which substituted the opinions of an outside expert for the decisions and processes of local councillors challengeable by the electorate.

Perhaps I was naïve to hope that there might be anything worthwhile in this. After all the LGA had submitted some powerful ideas – the need for new legislation, the need to respect localism, the need to remove the grip of the professional librarian. Nothing seems to survive.

Reactionary attitudes to this precious public service predominate: the All Party Parliamentary Group’s centralist vision is typical, while chief librarians engage in genteel social network shadow boxing with those who question whether a library should ever be more than a collection of books, especially books available round the corner at Waterstone’s.

To some degree one can ask: ‘Why worry’? The current government will not survive long and DCMS may well itself be swept away. But the APPG report serves as a warning to all of us that the agenda across the political spectrum is largely backward looking and centralist, rather than user-focussed and localist.

And if DCMS goes, the same civil servants who produced this policy paper from their ivory tower in Cockspur Street will continue to fail to engage with the realities of the service on the ground – and fail above all to understand that councillors can both understand their communities and understand what a library is for.