Public Libraries and Social Justice

John Pateman, John Vincent

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317073628
• Subtopic: Library & Information Science
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

The need for public libraries to tackle social exclusion and engage in social justice becomes ever more urgent as the gap between rich and poor continues to widen, and the very survival of public libraries in the heart of the community is open to debate. If public libraries are to develop and grow in the future and become relevant to the majority of their local communities, then they need to abandon outmoded concepts of 'excellence' and fully grasp the 'equity' agenda. This book examines the historical background to social exclusion and the strategic context in terms of government and professional policy. The authors propose a compelling manifesto for change and outline practical ways in which public libraries can be transformed into needs-based services.

1 Introduction

DOI: 10.4324/9781315602905-1

While carrying out the literature search for British Librarianship and Information Work 1991–2000 (Bowman 2006) and 2001–2005 (Bowman 2007), it became clear that little had been written about public libraries and social exclusion. There were a number of articles but no monographs.

As a new term begins with a coalition government, it is timely to look back and examine what New Labour achieved in one of their key social policy areas, social exclusion. It is also important to examine the professional response to the social exclusion agenda and its impact on traditional professional values such as ‘fairness’ and ‘neutrality’.

Much attention has been paid to two of the main themes underpinning Framework for the Future (DCMS 2003), the government's strategic blueprint for public library development:

• Books and reading have been the subject of significant pilots, programmes, funding streams, professional events and discussion.
• ICT has also enjoyed significant investment via the People's Network and, more recently, RFID (self-issue).

But the third main Framework theme – social exclusion – has been relatively neglected. There have been some inspiring local projects but no binding, robust and sustained strategic impetus. It is still widely claimed that public libraries are ‘open to all’ but much of the evidence suggests otherwise. Instead of coming from within the profession, the driving force for social exclusion initiatives has come from elsewhere – for example, from the seminal Open to All? research (Muddiman et al. 2000a, 2000b and 2000c) and the network of practitioners which it created (see, for example, The Network 2008).

While much of the library profession remains in denial about social exclusion, the need to tackle this agenda becomes ever more urgent as the gap between rich and poor continues to widen and the very survival of public libraries is open to debate. If public libraries are to develop and grow in the future and become relevant to the majority of their local communities, then they need to abandon outmoded concepts of excellence and fully grasp the equity agenda.

This book examines the historical background to social exclusion and the strategic context in terms of government and professional policy. It investigates definitions of social exclusion and suggests an appropriate service response. Most importantly, it proposes a manifesto for change and ways in which public libraries can be transformed into needs-based services.

One of the themes which runs through this book is that of ‘boom and bust’, which is very topical in the current economic climate. We want to understand why there have been waves of progressive librarianship which have not been sustainable. For example, the boom of community librarianship in the 1970s was followed by the bust of Thatcherite library policies in the 1980s. Since 1997, we have seen a boom of activity around libraries and social exclusion, but this looks likely to be followed by the bust of a coalition government. Like Gordon Brown and Alistair Darling, we want to understand how this cycle of boom and bust works and attempt to break it, if possible.

The problem with the boom and bust of progressive librarianship is that the booms are never very high or long-lasting; while the busts are very low, and go on for years, with 1979–97 being the most recent and painful example. One reason for this is that lip-service is paid to equity when it is expedient to do so, and then it is dropped when it is no longer necessary. Equity is not embedded in our professional culture and sometimes excellence and professional standards are used as an excuse or smokescreen for not pursuing social justice objectives and outcomes.

Another theme which runs through this book is that of co-production, which we define as ‘handing over the keys of the public library to the local community’. It is sometimes said that public libraries should return to their historical roots of helping the ‘deserving poor’. We would argue that you should go even further back in history to the time when local communities ran their own libraries. Some communities continued to do this right up until the Public Libraries Act was passed in 1964. In these communities all aspects of library provision, including staffing and stock selection, were managed by local people.

At some point, public libraries were hijacked by the middle classes who came to dominate both the running and the use of library services. Public libraries need to be given back to local communities by actively engaging them in the planning, design, delivery and assessment of library services. To date, this has been mostly in the form of using volunteers, but this approach is much too limited. Volunteers tend often to be middle class and part of the problem rather than the solution. Also, volunteers have no power, which remains in the hands of middle-class professionals. For equity to assert itself over excellence this power has to be shifted from librarians to the community.

This should not mean that cash-strapped local authorities simply dump the libraries they cannot afford to run on the local community. Instead the transfer of power should be in keeping with the principles of co-production. Good examples of co-production are patients’ self-help groups and time banks, where members swap free services that can range from babysitting to legal advice. The word was coined in the 1970s and the application to public libraries is obvious. A central concept is ‘the core economy’ – the vast fund of goodwill and bright ideas at grassroots level, which in reality is what keeps services, families and communities going (see, for example, Cahn 2007).

Co-production is supported by a wide range of organisations, including UNISON, the Cabinet Office, the New Economic Foundation (NEF) and Compass. As Lucie Stephens from the NEF explained ‘Co-production is not more passive choice. Co-production is action taken. We need to re-focus on the relationships between individual people at the frontline, working as facilitators to release huge assets in the community – skills, talents, networks, social capital, reciprocity. One-way transactions create dependency’ (Swaffield 2008).¹ In other words, library users must not be treated as mere consumers of ‘choices’ provided from above by library professionals. Instead, power and resources must be shared with local communities.

¹ Lucie Stephens was speaking at the joint launch of the NEF (Gannon and Lawson 2008) and the UNISON reports (UNISON 2009).

UNISON point out the need ‘for people to have meaningful control over their lives and the services they receive’ (UNISON 2009, 13), and Compass believe that it is the ‘alliance between public servants and members of the public that will provide the strongest and most durable basis for effective, responsive and popular public services’ (Gannon and Lawson 2008, 26).

The NEF are clear that local communities must be encouraged to ‘use the human skills and experience they have to help deliver public … services’ (Stephens et al. 2008, 10) and ‘broadening and deepening public services so that they are no longer the preserve of professionals or commissioners, but a shared responsibility … This is a challenge to the way professionals are expected to work’ (Stephens et al. 2008, 10–11). ‘By shifting professional practice in this way, the basic objective shifts as well. Delivering public services ceases to be merely about tackling symptoms and immediate needs. It depends on reaching out into the surrounding neighbourhood to build the social networks that can tackle the underlying causes and increase the capacity of the core economy’ (Stephens et al. 2008, 14).

Since 1979, the UK has become one of the most unequal countries in the world: the rich have become richer and the poor have become poorer. This process started under Thatcher's Conservative government and continued under New Labour, led by both Blair and Brown. In addition to the UK becoming more unequal and the gap between rich and poor getting wider, social mobility has also stalled and gone into reverse. People born in the late 1950s have a greater chance of becoming socially mobile than those born since the late 1970s.

These backward trends are evidenced in the latest update of the UK government strategy indicators (Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs 2009). The first thing to note is that in terms of social justice, the indicator is ‘to be developed’:

Table 1.1 Proxy measures of inequality

Performance indicator	Proxy measure
Infant mortality	There were 3.3 more infant deaths per 1,000 live births for those in semi-routine occupations than for those who were higher managerial.
Life expectancy	Life expectancy in deprived areas was 2.0 fewer years for men, and 1.6 fewer years for women.
Mortality rates	103 people per 100,000 died from circulatory diseases in deprived areas compared to the average of 79; and 133 compared with 115 people per 100,000 died from cancer.
Smoking	Smoking is more common in lower socio-economic groups – 25 per cent of routine and manual workers compared with 21 per cent of the total population
Diet	20 per cent of men and 25 per cent of women on the lowest incomes consumed five or more portions of fruit and vegetables per day, compared to 34 per cent and 36 per cent of men and women in the highest income group.
Environmental equality	Around 0.3 per cent of people in the least deprived areas experience four or more environmental conditions that are ‘least favourable’, compared with 20 per cent of people living in the most deprived areas.
Housing conditions	1.1m dwellings, 29 per cent of those in the social sector, are below the Decent Homes Standard. 1.2m vulnerable households, 39 per cent of those living in private sector properties, were in dwellings that are below the Decent Homes Standard.
Influencing local or national decisions	Between 2001 and 2009 the per cent of people who felt they could influence decisions affecting their local area fell from 43 per cent to 39 per cent.
Overall life satisfaction	63 per cent of social group E (casual labourers, state pensioners and the unemployed) were broadly satisfied with their lives compared to 79 per cent of those in social group AB (doctors, solicitors, accountants, teachers, nurses, police officers). The per cent of social group E rating themselves as extremely dissatisfied with their lives was about four times higher than for other groups.
Positive and negative feelings	The proportion of social group E experiencing positive feelings (58 per cent ) was much lower than the average, and the proportion of social group AB (76 per cent ) was much higher than the average. The per cent of people in social group E regularly experiencing negative feelings was much higher than average.
Child wellbeing	Fewer children who receive free school meals rated their local area as very or fairly good as a place to live and fewer rated themselves as healthy or physically active. Children who receive free school meals were more likely to say they had been bullied on most days.
Mental health	There is a correlation between above average positive mental health and household incomes of more than £36,400. There is a correlation between below average positive mental health and household incomes of less than £5,200.

• The Government Equalities Office and the Equalities and Human Rights Commission are jointly developing a framework for the measurement of inequality. This will aim to measure outcomes, discrimination and the degree of choice and control people have in achieving specific aspects of life.
• Indicators are being developed across 10 dimensions and for all the equality strands of gender, disability, ethnicity, religion and belief, age and sexual orientation. (Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs 2009, 102)

However, in the absence of these social justice indicators, there are a number of proxy indicators which can be used to measure how unequal, unfair and less cohesive the UK has become (see Table 1.1, drawn from the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs 2009).

Some of these figures are a national disgrace, given that the UK is one of the richest countries in the world.

A recent job advert by Oxfam for a Policy and Communications Manager was headlined ‘Poverty in the UK? That's rich’ and went on to say:

The UK is the world's sixth richest country. And yet one in five people live in poverty. The kind of poverty that means their children go to school hungry, and that they can't afford to heat their homes. At Oxfam, we know people don't choose to be poor. The fact is they find themselves in circumstances that leave them trapped. In this role, you’ll overturn misconceptions and you’ll transform policies. You’ll make sure that UK poverty is firmly on the agenda. It means striking a balance between pressurising the government for change and winning the hearts and minds of the public. If you’re an expert influencer and policy analyst, are confident in speaking out for change, and are tenacious and resilient, visit our website. ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• List of Abbreviations
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• 2 An Historical Overview
• 3 What is Social Exclusion?
• 4 Strategic Context
• 5 Tackling Social Exclusion
• 6 Developing a Needs-Based Library Service
• 7 Where Next?
• Appendix: The Recommendations from Open to All?
• Bibliography
• Index