WE’RE told we now have five weeks to save Golcar Library. Volunteer now, Kirklees says, or we will close it down.

This is an ultimatum, not a consultation. How quickly we can get rid of a proud public library service that has existed for 163 years! How diminished we will be!

This not the Big Society in action – this is just a way of pressuring reluctant community groups into running public service libraries for free, without any real concern for the delivery of the service or the impact that this will have on our communities.

We need professionally led libraries in the centre of our communities because people need libraries to support them in literacy and skills development, enable them to access knowledge, and find the information that they need to live successful lives.

Volunteers will need good training otherwise the library service will be de-skilled – akin to saying schools no longer need professional teachers or hospitals trained doctors.

Do volunteers actually know what library staff do?

This is the start of the ‘consultation process’ for Golcar, Slaithwaite, Shepley, Denby Dale, Honley, Kirkheaton and Lepton Libraries. Kirklees Council must consult these communities – when Surrey Council didn’t carry out a consultation they were taken to court and their decision to close their libraries was reversed.

To remind councils of their responsibilities, it has been necessary for Culture Minister Ed Vasey to write to councils in England reminding them that they have to provide ‘a comprehensive and efficient library service’ under the Public Libraries Acts of 1850 and 1964.

Despite this, in Somerset and Gloucestershire, the council’s action in closing libraries has been ruled by a judge to be contrary to equalities legislation and to hurt disadvantaged groups such as the elderly and disabled.

Community run libraries have been tried before and sustainability is not assured. For example, Delph library in Oldham became a community run library in 2005. It struggled to find enough volunteers and had to revert to stamping books manually because of issues about accessing customers’ records.

They have now rejoined Oldham Libraries network and have been given £20,000 to do this.

If you want to volunteer, has your village an existing community group with a large number of volunteers willing to take on the library? Who will manage them? The retirement age has gone up and we are exhausted looking after grandchildren and elderly parents as well.

Honley would have a community-run library alongside council run libraries in Holmfirth and Meltham so there will be variations in the quality of provision even though we all pay the same amount of tax.

It doesn’t have to be this way – there could be a real debate on what we want from our libraries in the 21st century, how to prepare for the digital future and libraries investing in e-books.

We could discuss professional library staff working alongside volunteers who are getting proper training or suggest libraries doing something imaginative – like Hillingdon Council, who incorporated Starbucks into their libraries (scaled to the size of each library, from cafés to vending machines) with profits ploughed back into the service. Visitors have more than doubled year on year.

Suzanne Dufton

Honley Library Book Group

Volunteers can’t do it

KIRKLEES Council wants you to: ‘Volunteer to save your local library’.

In handing libraries over to volunteers the council will cut key services. Without trained staff in their volunteer run libraries, Kirklees Council will only provide vital information and advice services from centralised service centres in Huddersfield and Dewsbury and via its telephone call centre and website.

The Kirklees Council customer strategy states that this will ‘meet our customer requirements and reflects their changing need’.

If you have just lost your job, are struggling with debt, don’t have a computer and can no longer afford a telephone or bus fares – don’t worry, you can use your local library facilities for free. So far.

Remember this change in services reflects your ‘changing need’!

Why won’t senior politicians and directors meet with local residents to hear how our needs are already met by the current library services?

We do not want to fill in a touch screen survey devised to give answers that support such a flawed strategy.

Staffed libraries are an essential part of the ‘Big Society’. The staff have the skills and local knowledge to support local residents.

They can advise on local groups, give access to council services, teach residents how to use computers to search for and apply for jobs and by being based in local communities they support local businesses by encouraging the use of the village centres.

They are the beating heart of our communities.

Last year 156,800 people used the seven threatened libraries. So why is Kirklees Council turning its back on all these people by refusing to listen and respond to their needs?

John Guildford

Golcar

Time to save library

THE consultation about Golcar library is a sham.

Kirklees Council is inviting local Golcar citizens to volunteer to run the well loved and well used Golcar library. But it is not giving information that is easy to access about what volunteering will involve – which means residents may put themselves forward not understanding the council’s real plan.

What the council really wants but doesn’t make clear is for volunteers to be fully responsible for running the library through a formal community group.

And of course the council can at any time withdraw any support to the community group such as cash, buildings or “support in kind” – such as providing books. Why won’t the council come clean?

And come on Golcar residents – it is still possible to save our library by not volunteering

Roz Roberts

Golcar

Punish pavement parkers

IF there are laws and by-laws applicable to parking cars on public pavements, they should be applied.

In many residential areas cars are parked, some day and night, outside houses with empty drives, making the pavement unusable.

Parking is a problem almost everywhere nowadays. Where this hampers the safe passage of pedestrians, and is habitual, this selfish and totally inconsiderate practice must surely be punishable.

Retired Driver

Huddersfield

‘Friends’ could help

TO interpret a suggestion that Colne Valley Beagles consider working with a Friends group to help secure the maintenance and future protection of Delves/Butternab Wood in preference to developing it as a war games zone hardly amounts to a threat – although Lisa Hirst seems to think it does (Mailbag, March 6).

She is entirely wrong to claim there is no public footpath through the wood. There is and it is a designated public right of way apart from a small branch which leaves the main footpath near the top of the wood.

People have a right to use the footpath while accepting that the wood itself is private land.

Ms Hirst mentions problems such as fly tipping.

These are precisely the issues over which a Friends group could assist the Hunt through planned maintenance and management.

A Friends group could apply for charitable status and would then be eligible for funding from several sources.

Neighbouring examples include the Friends of Beaumont Park which rescued the park from years of decline into an award winning attraction and Friends of Dean Wood who assist in the maintenance and management of that wood.

By coincidence, in the same edition as Ms Hirst’s missive, the Examiner reported the concerns of the Woodland Trust over the future of more than 200 ancient woodlands currently under threat from inappropriate development.

The Trust fears that many of these ancient woodlands could be lost forever. It’s not unreasonable to try to ensure Delves Wood is not one of them.

To try to compare, as Ms Hirst does, the planned war games development in the wood with activity at Crosland Moor Airfield seems absurd.

The latter is not ‘a stone’s throw away’ but is well away from residential development in a relatively isolated location and its activities are unobtrusive.

Michael Fay

Beaumont Park

There’s no threat

LISA Hirst of Almondbury, Colne Valley Beagles and Airsoft Operator, who would run war games in Butternab Woods, are not being threatened by Michael Fay.

Nobody is trying to tell anybody what they can and can’t do with their own land. But I do object to the suggestion that residents have been trespassing in the woods for many years. People come from far and wide to the woods.

Lisa is right about one thing – everyone has a right to voice an opinion.

What would Lisa’s be if it was planned to hold war games near where she lived?

Anne Welburn

Beaumont Park