Where did the water go?

The story is by now famous all over the world. In 2004, an earthquake deep beneath the Indian Ocean triggered a tsunami that destroyed hundreds of thousands of lives and livelihoods. One of the most striking images of that tragedy was of people standing on a barren coastline, laid bare by the lowest tide they’d ever seen — unaware that a tidal wave was travelling toward them at 500 mph.

As the UK’s public services stagger to their feet following the earthquake that was the COVID-19 pandemic and the public ‘lockdown’ that (eventually) ensued, there is every risk that we find ourselves in a similar position, figuratively speaking.

While we talk about re-opening, the quarantining of books and social distancing measures — out there, in the corridors of power and the coffers of the Exchequer, an economic tidal wave is building that is likely to be far more devastating than the privations of the past few months.

Nobody alive today has experienced the stopping and restarting of a global economy. The scale of it is bewildering — in the UK alone, our national economy is estimated to have shrunk by a quarter over pre-lockdown levels. At the same time, public sector borrowing has risen above £2trn for the first time since 1963 as the Government’s interventions seek to limit mass job losses.

As we await two major speeches — from PM Boris Johnson and Chancellor Rishi Sunak — it is clear that the Government’s current line is to seek to keep everyone happy — from businesses to public services, sole traders to corporations. But the reality is going to bite hard, and quite likely very soon.

The total cost of the fiscal stimulus package (which covers things like furlough and underwriting business loans) is estimated to be between £330 and 430bn a year. The question is not whether the cost of this package, alongside depressed tax revenues and sharp falls in export trading, will trigger a recession — it already has — but whether this recession will be so deep that it crosses the line into a Depression.

The difference is significant — in the words of a recent Coutts analysis:

“A depression is deeper and longer-lasting than a recession, characterised by an extended period of high unemployment, low levels of economic activity and stunted production. There’s been only one global depression in the last century, the Great Depression of the 1930s, during which US GDP fell by 33% (from 1929 to 1933).

Recessions can be painful for many — losing your job or your business will always hurt — but the broader economy survives. A depression, on the other hand, has the potential to create unpredictable, profound and enduring damage beyond the economy.”

But even a recession, coming as it does on the heels of a decade of austerity, has the potential to have a crushing impact on public services. Even after emergency support, Local Government is still signalling a funding shortfall of more than £6bn in year, compounding the existing pressures of demographic change and the rising cost of services.

We have already heard of at least 5 Councils considering the point at which they will need to issue ‘Section 114’ notices under the Local Government Finance Act (1988) — the local Government equivalent of filing for bankruptcy and agreeing a repayment plan with your creditors. At that point, even with the best will in the world, Local Authority Chief Executives and Elected members will have no choice but to slash even statutory services to their barest minimum.

As Rob Whiteman, CEO of the Chartered Institute of Public Finance and Accountancy writes for the Local Government Chronicle:

Despite the fact that councils have been able to maintain resilient financial positions amid deep budget cuts, the absence of a long-term funding solution already implied that this position will not be sustainable for the future. But now a financial tsunami of reduced income and increased cost is heading in councils’ way. While it’s vital that our health service is given everything it needs to fight this disease, we must not forget the crucial role of services like public health, social care and all community services.

The risks for our national public library service are clear. The legislative basis of the statutory duty for library provision — the 1964 Public Libraries and Museums Act — has been shown time and again in the past decade to be wafer-thin as a defence against economically-motivated cuts to services. We know already how threadbare an offer can be judged to be ‘comprehensive and efficient’ when Councils have a mind to it.

There is a deep irony in the fact that the magnificent efforts of public libraries to effect a ‘digital pivot’ to serve their new and existing audiences online may turn out to be their undoing as cash-strapped Councils start to take the view that an online offer and a large Central Library may be sufficient to discharge their duties under the Act.

If, as seems likely from current conversations within Local Government, local library services are about to undergo cuts that make the ‘Beeching Moment’ of the last decade seem like a gentle trim, we need to take action now — while the tide is low and the wave hasn’t yet hit us — to protect as much of the sector as is reasonably possible.

The first issue is that we are now in a position whereby Councils have what they consider to be a ‘least worst’ option — to hand the running of library services over to communities and volunteers with varying degrees of professional and financial support. In the face of the coming deluge, this is the option they will reach for — it is relatively politically painless and even comes with an accompanying narrative of ‘empowering local people to run their own local services’.

But the risks of this strategy are legion. Running effective, welcoming, sustainable library services that meet the full range of community needs is a professional job requiring professional skills and dedicated effort. It isn’t just a question of implementing rote processes — it requires management and leadership without which it becomes a shadow of the universal, inclusive and empowering public service that people worldwide have a right to expect. In extremis, it stops being a library and becomes a community centre with books in.

If we are really going to counter the impact of the coming deluge, we need to find a better ‘service provider of last resort’ than simply handing off services to communities.

If Councils are unable to run services themselves, then they remain able to commission them — and so if we want to preserve as much of our library network as possible, we need to find a commissioning model that is better-aligned to the public service ethos of the public library, which almost certainly means working with the existing community of service providers and sector organisations to form the library equivalent of ‘International Rescue’ for services at risk.

But here too are risks — we have already seen one major outsourcing provider go under in the shape of Carillion and there are rumblings in the sector that a number of arms-length providers, mutuals and trusts may have to consider reneging on their contracts and ‘handing libraries back’ to the Local Authority.

Not only this, but our infrastructure for managing and protecting the public library sector is barely any better now than it was when we entered the first wave of austerity a decade ago. We still lack the data, the situational awareness, the legal defence and the networks of influence to mount an effective and coordinated defence against the public sector cuts that are heading our way.

Relationships between campaigners, library services and library-sector organisations are still fraught and lacking in either focus or tactical consensus. Too many people are willing to say “this shouldn’t be happening” while failing to deal with the fact that it is, and that any defence has by definition to work with the grain of the current Government (deeply unpalatable though that might be!).

It is not too late to take action to defend our sector. It is too late to build proper flood barriers and defences, but it is not too late to formulate a plan to protect as much as we can. So here’s what we could do:

• Form an emergency council of campaigners, sector organisations and sector leaders whose job is effectively to act as the ‘war room’ to oversee the defence of our sector in the coming months;
• Establish an ‘early warning’ system so that we can ensure we know how the financial situation is impacting on Councils across the UK, and which are at greatest risk;
• Establish a protocol for intervention which uses the pre-emptive work done by the DCMS in their ‘superintendence’ role to seek to limit damaging decisions before they are made and to suggest alternative paths for Councils to follow;
• Take the existing Peer Review mechanism and funding and translate it across to providing Emergency Service Review Support and Planning for services at risk;
• Liaise with existing outsourcing providers to agree a framework for a ‘Service Provider of last resort’ model, able to take on the interim management of library services from the Council where necessary;
• Provide support, investment and training for frontline leaders to help them build their own resilience and that of their organisation and staff.

None of the likely options ahead is ideal, and we must continue to aspire towards the kind of high-quality, fully-funded library service in every town, city and village that we all know is what is really required. But desperate times call for desperate measures.

Here we stand. The waters have drawn back. The wave is building, out in the distant ocean. How will we use the time we have?