Library closures 'will be threat to isolated rural communities'

Isolated rural communities will be left without vital services if councillors opt for a "soft option" to close dozens of North Yorkshire's libraries as part of multi-million-pound cuts, campaigners have warned.

North Yorkshire County Council is having to enforce a massive programme of financial savings to counter a huge fall in Government funding which could see as many as 23 of the authority's 42 libraries closed.

A national campaign group, Voices for the Library, has warned that the proposed shake-up of libraries in North Yorkshire is one of the most severe in the country, and could see countryside communities left without key services.

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The county council has made a great play in recent years of promoting its libraries as "community hubs" to provide internet access, services and advice in addition to simply loaning books, and the authority has bucked a national trend and seen the number of users actually increase. Half of North Yorkshire's 600,000-strong population are now registered with the libraries.

Voices for the Library was launched in September last year by a group of professional librarians a month before the Government announced plans for its Comprehensive Spending Review.

The campaign group's spokesman for North Yorkshire, Simon Barron, said: "Many councils are seeing libraries as a soft option for closure to make their financial cuts.

"But we want to try and show people what libraries are about in the modern world, and the important role they serve for local communities – particularly in rural areas like North Yorkshire."

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Representatives from Voices for the Library are liaising with local campaign groups in North Yorkshire launched to save specific sites, including Easingwold, Barlby and Eastfield in Scarborough.

Senior councillors and MPs including Andrew Jones, who represents the Harrogate and Knaresborough constituency and has been vocal in his support of libraries, are also being petitioned.

The county council announced plans in November to make cuts totalling 20.5m from its budgets for services including adult social care and libraries. The authority is having to enforce savings of more than 69m across all of its departments, and 2.3m will need to be cut from the existing annual library budget of 7.5m over the next two years.

The Yorkshire Post revealed in July last year that libraries were set to bear the brunt of public spending cuts as figures revealed one in 20 had already been closed across the region during the past decade.

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The county council has announced that it is focusing its resources on just 18 library sites including Harrogate, Skipton, Selby, Whitby, Scarborough and Richmond, placing another 23 in jeopardy. A fleet of 10 mobile libraries is also due to be ditched, with a second "super-mobile" vehicle introduced to replace the service in certain areas of the county.

Senior councillors have stressed that communities need to step in to run their local libraries – or face losing them. A deal which has seen residents take on the running of the library in the Dales town of Hawes is being seen as a model for the future.

The council's executive member for adult and community services, Chris Metcalfe, was adamant that library closures are not a "soft option" as he admitted all of the authority's services, including care of the elderly and highways maintenance, are at risk.

He said: "We simply do not have enough money, and people will need to come to us and help develop plans to save the libraries, otherwise they will be forced to close. And once a library is lost, it is likely it will be lost forever – like village pubs and shops. But every department is facing the same amount of cuts."

A three-month public consultation on the proposed restructuring of libraries will continue until the end of February.