“Public Library News” reports today that as our Libraries come under more and more threat, a movement is starting nationally to stop the Trend.
BookSeller- "Councils have been accused of seeing libraries as “soft options” and "easy targets" when it comes to deciding on budget cuts and run the risk of "undermining rights" by not fulfilling their legal duties to provide library services, campaigners have said. Following government cuts to local authority budgets, dozens of libraries across the country are under threat as councils review their budgets before the new financial year in April, with some already revealing plans for severe reductions to their library services."
Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals (CILIP) c.e.o. Nick Poole said the cuts "...undermine rights which are enshrined in the Equality Act, Human Rights Act and Public Libraries & Museums Act. We have a situation where our national network of libraries is being dismantled while government fails to provide the guidance that local authorities need to provide the comprehensive and efficient library services they must, by statute, provide .."
CILIP is organising a petition to the Government to persuade them to stop the continual death of a thousand cuts to Libraries and to ensure that the statutory rights we all have to a Library are maintained in the face of Councils who see cutting Libraries as a soft touch. Please sign the petition and forward it to as many of your friends as possible and ask them to sign too.
All of us in Burnham can see the wonderful job that our library and its devoted staff do to ensure we have such a service, which is available to everybody in the community without exception. So many people in Burnham visit our Library and remark what a friendly and vibrant place it is with something to offer to so many different groups of people. We cannot lose this.
Please sign the petition here.
Andrew Strathdee, Chairman
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