Update: 23.09.13 comment from Cllr King, cabinet member for libraries, and a resident talks about not knowing when the Lockleaze library will be open so they no longer go.
“Due to staff shortages Whitchurch Library will be closed today,” Tweeted the Bristol Library service on Monday, 24 July 2023.
It wasn’t a one-off. There have been ever more closures recently. Every day there seems to be another library unavailable either all day or just for lunch because there’s only one staff member employed. Others close for the morning or afternoon.
I don’t know why there are staff shortages and whether it is related to the recruitment freeze the administration implemented last year. I can’t say whether these same patterns are happening in children’s services and adult social care or in housing teams. Do those teams have enough workers? are there shortages elsewhere? I don’t know.
All I know is that daily occurrences lead to patterns over time. We can look at those and see if the effects are disproportionately visible in some libraries more than others.
For those who want to know the results now, I can tell you that Lockleaze library had the equivalent of nearly eight weeks of closures over 20 months. For those living in the city centre, no closures would have been noticed from Central and Bedminster libraries.
But let’s look at the rest of the libraries. Has provision of the statutory duty for “a comprehensive and efficient library service for all persons” been breached?
Public library services are funded and either run or commissioned by local government. Library authorities (unitary, county or metropolitan borough councils) have a statutory duty under the Public Libraries and Museums Act 1964 ‘to provide a comprehensive and efficient library service for all persons’ for all those who live, work or study in the area (section 7).
Bristol has 27 libraries spread throughout the city. Not all wards have a library. Some libraries cover up to three wards. Over the Labour adminstration (since 2016), library funding has been cut by £3m years. Further cuts of £130k occurred over the last two years.
The libraries range in size and opening hours.
The Bristol Libraries Twitter account has been reporting ad hoc library closures for a while now. I’ve looked through a couple of years worth of tweets and when I got as far back as Covid, I stopped.
This current bout of escalating closures began with a tweet in July 22, saying Avonmouth was shut all day due to ‘staff shortages’. It was shut again in August for the same reason while Stockwood library was shut for an afternoon.
In September there were six instances of ‘staff shortages’ causing closures. After that, the closures started coming in a lot more frequently: 28 in October, 27 in November and 50 in December.
The closures from staff shortages began to be noticed. In March, there were 94 closures across the library network specifically citing staff shortages as the reason.
On 9 April this year, 12 libraries were affected by closures.
That month, Bristol City Council announced they would begin to recruit for library roles. They have been recruiting ever since. The closing date for applications was end of May. Whitchurch was closed all day on the 24th, and the day before that, Henbury, Junction 3, Marksbury Road and Clifton libraries had closures. Clifton was shut all day and the other three were closed over lunch.
Bristol Libraries have said that ‘staff shortages across the library network’ are to blame, and this intrigued me. Are closures affecting all 27 libraries in the same ways, and are all areas affected equally?
The following chart shows the number of closures per branch where the reason cited was staff shortages. Bishopsworth has the most at over 40 in the 20 month period, and Central has 0.
As we’ve already seen, not all libraries are open for the same number of hours or on the same days. The following chart shows the total number of hours the libraries are open each week.
There are variations between which libraries face closures just at lunch or for the whole day.
We can see that Bishopsworth Library was mostly shut for hourly sessions while Lockleaze closures were for the whole day. Now that we have some idea how long we each library is open and what type of closure they faced, it is easier to assess the length of closure.
Looking at just the closures were the effects were a lack of library provision for the whole day, we can see that nine libraries have been closed for over two weeks, while one library, Lockleaze, has been closed for nearly 8 weeks over the 20 month period.
Lockleaze isn’t one of the three libraries with an extended access service (open only to over 16s or accompanied young people). They are St George, Stockwood and Westbury.
After looking at this data, it seems clear the effects of staff shortages are not distributed evenly across the 27 libraries. In some areas, library users would not have noticed much difference, while in other places, the lack of provision would have been more acute.
At what point does this become a lack of statutory provision of library services by councils? Is eight weeks without a library, providing a comprehensive and efficient library service?
There’s no new information posted here. It’s all been collected from the Bristol Libraries Twitter account. There may be parts missing or last minute changes that were not updated.
Further questions that would be interesting to look at:
how close are the nearest libraries?
how concentrated are the closures? are they every day? once a week? once a month? etc.
The data is available from my Kaggle page.
Update: in reference to Lockleaze library
Sorry to hear this Joanna Library staff are the heart of any Library their expertise is amazing our Central Library in Liverpool had amazing staff who helped me find research books and journals when i needed to find information. Some where actually better than the University librarians thanks for sharing much appreciated 🙏
Kind regards Paul