Minutes of the 29th Jan Save Preston Library Meeting

The minutes of our latest meeting can be found here.

Further Discussions with Cllr Hirani

Cllr Hirani and I had a further exchange on his blog, have a look at his reply to my original comment  and my follow up. It will be interesting to see if he continues the exchange.

My reply to Cllr Krupesh Hirani

Cllr Krupesh Hirani has a blog post in which he claims that the government's cuts are forcing the library closures. Here is my response to him:

I'm sorry I disagree that the coalition are forcing the removal of library services in Brent. It's down to each individual council on how to deal with the cuts in their grants.

Someone somewhere in the council has brainwashed the Labour executive into thinking that closing 50% of the libraries is the only solution. It isn't the only solution to meet the cuts, but the council has so far refused to engage us in a meaningful intelligent dialogue towards working to an alternative that keeps residents and the accountants happy. 

I think the council should appreciate that a U-turn on this policy would not be seen as a political climb down to be exploited by their feeble conservative opponents who I have on numerous occasions invited to come up with an alternative strategy without proper response.  Instead residents would see that the council is willing to put people before politics. The question is is a young councillor like yourself wiling to help put the argument forward?

I do hope so. 

Save Preston Library Meeting Today

The Save Preston Library group meets today at 10am at the library. Come and join us.

Back from the Wembley Area Consultative Forum

I just got back from the Wembley Area Consultative Forum. As expected Brent Council are sticking to their guns however here's my assessment of the situation:

I actually feel more positive than I expected too. I think there are plenty of avenues of attack if we have people in the group that have the time to devote to them.

The positives are this:

1) We now know who the main person we need to convince is - Cllr Powney

2) One of my local labour councillors is going to try and get Powney to agree to meet with me.

3) Samantha made an excellent, calm, well reasoned case. 

4) They're future proposals like e-books, bigger mobile library service are all un-costed, un-thought-through. This is a good point we can fight on.

5) Preston got quite a few mentions by a lot of people

The negatives are this:

1) While I accept they haven't chosen Preston Library to sell it, it's clear that they plan to throw the money (or at least part of it) that they'd get from selling the building onto white elephant projects such as an e-books solution. The publisher that spoke at the end of the meting was right in that paper books are receiving a revival. Powney's arguments on this front were very weak and not backed up by the evidence that I have seen. To this end I propose to try and bargain with them and offer to build the e-books solution for them for free if they use the money that they have ear marked on that to keep Preston Library open.

2) The way Ann and Powney treated Samantha was very very rude imho, which is what caused me to shout at Ann. I apologised to her afterwards, but they really "just don't get it" when it comes to the travel. I think the way we deal with this is to give figures. So we show current fares, we show projected fare rises for the next five years etc. etc.

3) They're not going to buy the whole cut hours and keep all libraries open approach.

I really think we need to get the teachers of the local schools behind us. That should make a difference. I think while it's good to try and work with the other libraries, the case for saving Preston is definitely stronger than say Bahram yet the council are more amenable to saving the others because they can't sell the buildings off /  get out of leases anyway. Because of this I think on Saturday I may propose we focus on saving Preston. I'm going to mull it over first.

We need to build up  a proper figures database. So things like number of visits per square foot etc. Peak times for each library etc. We should aim to have this collated by roughly 3 weeks from now, which then gives us time to formulate a plan.

What do people think of my suggested way forward? It'll only work if the majority of us want to do it this way. I'll go with the majority opinion.