A sham, a sham, our kingdom for their sham!!

"There is no sin except stupidity" - Oscar Wilde
 

Council Executive Committee: 17th May 2013

Burnage Library: 1974-2013  RIP

Following what we thought was a modest victory on the 14th May at the neighbourhood scrutiny committee, a few of us attended the council's executive committee meeting on the morning of the 17th May, just to make sure they saw it through.

The meeting started with Richard Lees introducing the agenda and we found the library discussion on item 4 of the agenda again.

We got to item 4 very quickly, however due to traffic problems our speaker Sam Darby was delayed so they deferred the library decison until later, to deal with the broadway baths issue.

Sam arrived and when the Broadway bath matters were decided, it as time for the main event.

What was interesting was how the meeting was carried out. Richard Lees was very definitely in control of matters and if I was not mistaken, seemed to be intent on making decisions the way he wanted them to go. That somewhat worried me, as there was the chance that the library consultation results from the scrutiny committee could well be overturned.  Neil MacInnes was there and so were Sue Murphy and Rosa Battle.

Recap: Neighbourhood Scrutiny Committee

During the neighbourhood scrutiny committee meeting on the 14th May, two amendments were proposed by Mike Amesbury, which were seconded and thirded and more or less unanimously agreed by the scrutiny committee to be put forward to the executive committee meeting on the Friday, 17th May. They were in essence:

1. Amend the report to remove the date of the 29th June for closure of the library
2. Maintain staff in libraries even after their transferral to any continuing groups

Neil MacInnes read verbatim a statement that he had prepared towing the line for the library closure. Rosa Battle spoke to confirm the appointment of a library officer to work with the 6 libraries slated for closure and Sue Murphy then spoke in support of the closures, pretty much as if the scrutiny committee hadn't happened. Councillors Wheale and Dimauro, who are both Lib Dem councillors spoke in support of the libraries, but Richard Lees just accused them of lying, of causing the financial problems in the first place, of not delivering on promises to lobby government on MCC's behalf and stated that everything cllr Simon Wheale was saying was lies. Simon Wheale continued to argue the case for the libraries and Richard Lees, after more or less telling him to shut up (very politically of course) just repeatedly shrugged his shoulders and stopped listening. I found that laughable so that had to be tweeted straight away :-/ 

Despite us finding out later that the minutes included both the amendments, the only concillation we got was the Richard Lees mentioned that one amendment had been proposed to remove the date, but then caveated that by saying that "The council expects that all proposals will be in place by the end of June" which to me signalled the death knell, since this in essence is the same as the original proposal, just without an explicit date.

Sure enough, Richard Lees then proposed the closure of the libraries, without debate on any of the points, without any representative mentioning any concrete plans to address the issues raised in the equality impact assessment etc. The whole thing was full of flowery language, no numbers other than the £80 million worth of cuts we had to make and reiterated Sue Murphy's point on how if Manchester was treated fairly the city would be £1 million a week better off... blah blah and sure enough, it received near unanimous agreement from the council, despite the scrutiny committee results. So that was the final nail in the coffin.

The Backlash

Needless to say our group amongst others were furious! The whole consultation had been an absolute sham. Members of our campaign showed their anger by voicing it directly at Richard Lees and Sue Murphy as we were on our way out. Richard Lees then said if we wanted to discuss it with Rosa Battle, we could stay until after the meeting and that the remaining matters on the agenda would only take 5 or 10 minutes to conclude.

Sure enough we got our time. Eimonne tagged along too but Neil MacInnes and his team, yet again, made a very swift exist.

Rosa battle adopted a very political stance and was trying to bring order to proceedings by asking people to put their hands up to speak.In my experience, that means that choosing someone to speak would be at their (or sympathisers') discretions. Given the dirty tactics we'd just experienced, even I had to say my decorum went out of the window. It was time to hold them to account and I was going to do just that and luckily so was everyone else. I knew Eimonne is technically a senior officer in that department, so I was going to have a conversation with him, bypassing Rosa altogether. I didn't have the inclination to give her the time of day.

It's no secret that I think MCC have not exchausted the options they had. I am an apolitial individual and until this experience, really had no strong political feelings in any direction. If the analysis was competent, I wouldn't be so angry. I stated that almost word for word but one thing that stuck in my throat was when Rosa Battle had the audacity to imply that the decison had been made (which it had) and in order to move forward, why don't I work with the council to build the service. Someone from the Fallowfield campaign implied I should just "suck it and see" and Rosa agreed. I more or less blew up at that point and said in no uncertain terms that I did just taste council operations and it sucked, so I can't trust the council to competently work with us in any way. It was a disgrace.    

I and other campaign members, who were visibly very upset with the decion, targeted the next barrage at Eimonne. I started to pick apart their reasoning and they were lost. It was obvious they were lost. Rosa tried to diffuse the situation by joking "I feel like I'm on Countdown" (personally I doubt anyone in MCC could qualify) inferring that she actually had to htink numbers. I took Eimonne to task on the strategy, since he needs to align with the cuts and after confirming with Rosa that no staff would lose their jobs in the library service, they could have spread the detremine across all of Manchester by potentially using volunteers, moving the extraneous staff  out of the library service to elsewhere in the council where operational requirements demand (and thus taking funding from those budgets instead of the library service budget) and they could not only keep the library service open, but still have change!

The minutes of the scrutiny committee were not circulated to all public attendees of the meeting. They were only circulated to the councillors on the scrutiny committee. So we never saw them to verify they were a correct record until after the executive committee meeting had ended and even then, whilst we were in this heated debate with Rosa and Eimonne. Rosa indicated that there was a 'plan' for Burnage, which our campaign jumped on! Since we were not aware of it. Upon our insistence, Eimonne then clarified what the plan was and as far as I was concerned, that wasn't a plan.It was a vision! He tried to fob my arguments off as operational matters but I told him that in times of uncertainty, those are constraints on your strategy and reiterated that he needed to align with the cuts using current evidence and the report hadn't done that.

In short, we left there very aggrieved. A good number of our campaign team stayed in the cafe for lunch and also to discuss some options for the future of the library. We have a meeting on the 22nd May and we will discuss them then.

Burnage Library RIP! :-(


EA

I h8 Appendix 8!

"That must be wonderful; I have no idea of what it means." - Albert Camus

Following on from our submitted impact analysis transport and my comments in the previous blog, I was looking at Appendix 8, with it's distinct lack of legend or key trying to figure out what it was showing us. Two maps imply 20 minutes of walking and public transport catchments areas for both the current and proposed estate. This is an important and relevant analysis, but what I noted was that Appendix 8 is not explicitly referenced anywhere in the library consultation report.

After a bit of head scratching, I managed to work out what these maps were. This pink background on the two contour maps show the reader the catchment area for 20 minutes of walking or travelling by public transport to a library somewhere on the estate. The pins, which you can barely see in the report show the location of the library estate. Finally, the combination of blue, red, yellow, green, olive green and lavender contour lines effectively bound the Manchester City Council catchment area as a whole. OK, so far so good.

However the report is presented on two pages, so it is not easy to see the differences in the accessibility of the estate. So I took both maps and overlay them to find the difference and for clarity I produced the following map. Yes it does look like a 'spot the difference' competition. Indeed, that is effectively what it is  :-)

fig 1 - Transportation differences between current proposed  estate (click to enlarge)

Important Notes

There are 5 major areas which are going to see accessibility to a library drop. Following on from yesterday's critique, these are the areas surrounding New Moston, (circle A), Burnage (B), Barlow Moor (C and D),  Northenden (D and E). The component drop in provision for each area of the Manchester Library and Information  Services estate is large. Burnage, Northenden and New Moston in particular will find themselves impacted with very large loss of accessibility.

In appendix 8 of the library consultation report, you can probably see 'spots' of accessibility and service provision such as those in the top right and also circled in region B in my diagram and may be wondering why it isn't connected to the rest of the background colour. After all, you would assume that if you lived in those areas and they are within 20 minutes walk of the library estate and walked to a library, then anywhere on your journey is also within that distance right? And you'd be correct, for walking.

I pretty strongly suspect these spots are due to public transport links, since if a bus stop doesn't exist at a specific point in the route, you can't catch the bus from there. Since you can only catch it from a bus stop, the next bus stop in the journey would be the next spot along or you go into the main body of the pink background. The reason they are circles and not just 'dots' is because of a walking 'window' to the bus stop  which allows the analysis to include it a 20 minute journey in total (i.e. the bus journey and the walking to and from the bus stop associated with it). For example, if the bus journey is 18 minutes, then the circle of walking would be 2 minutes from a bus stop, so the size of the spot is quite small. If the bus journey is 5 minutes, then the radius of walking is 10 minutes, which would be 5 times larger in diameter than the 2 minute spot (around 25 times larger in area).

Importantly, the new library estate opens up a hole in provision where Barlow Moor library is (circle D) and the combined closure of Northenden Library mutually affect  residents of both regions. The same 'double whammy' is true for Burnage and Levenshulme residents (circle E).

Additionally, due to the aggregate grouping of the walking and bus times, the move from a resident walking to a resident catching a bus (or two, as we have seen previously) is not recorded. Ignoring that the analysis does not appear to have taken appendix 8 into account, this means that larger detrimental effects which include more than one bus journey within that 20 minute window will occur due to the intermediate leg waiting times. A long wait in the intermediate leg of a journey, is impossible to determine from these maps alone.

Hence, for those catching two buses, especially those on the north side of Burnage (although they are shown here within 20 minute from the estate), the wait at the intermediate stop would take residents using public transport over the 20 minute journey time which is somewhat corroborated using the 30 minute frequency given on page 93 of the library consultation report.

Charteris Implications

The Charteris report highlighted that Wirral Metropolitan Borough Council took travelling times into account as it considered it a better measure of accessibility and impact than the straight line distance. Given I submitted that within our transport impact assessment report, I definitely agree that this is true. However, again, MCC insist on using straight line distance, which are irrelevant measure to the population of Manchester. Travelling by car requires using a road, which in Manchester, is never the shortest distance between two points. Using public transport, you can only go where the bus or train goes and that is also not the shortest distance as the crow flies. So it was adjudged that Wirral Metropolitan Borough Council actually did that right and the Charteris report didn't fault them on that specific point.

Hence, MCC with it's 'as the crow flies' measure is likely to fall foul of the Charteris outcome. The granularity and analysis of this information is inadequate and indeed, is not included at all. Presenting a diagram without reference to the analysis conducted using it, does not constitute having analysed the impact. It's 'lip service'.

Summary

Yet again, MLIS don't appear to know what they are analysing. As we have seen in the first critique, the decision to back the proposals within the library consultation is based on corroborating the original decision to close those libraries. As I showed then, the decision is not fair and impartial and is not based on anything other than catchment area size. It doesn't care or take into account the impact assessments nor does it care about the provisions for protected characteristics (specifically children and young people).

As we in the Save Burnage Library campaign showed in our Impact assessment on community literacy and demographics, the effect of these closures on children of those library catchment areas where accessible provision will not be available will massively impact those individuals for the rest of their lives, decrease the Manchester literacy rate, increase costs to MCC in other budgetary areas to solve the resulting social difficulties, disadvantage not just those individuals, but the entire city as the proportion of the local skilled workforce declines. This would mean Manchester becomes dependent on immigrated income from other parts of the UK, whilst simultaneously potentially seeing knowledge emigration out of the city.

I call upon the councillors of the neighbourhood scrutiny committee to return or reject this report on the grounds it has not considered relevant evidence and also considered irrelevant material.


EA

What, When, Where...

"Books serve to show a man that those original thoughts of his aren’t very new after all."–Abraham Lincoln

Campaign Updates!

We have had a number of results from activities this week:

Door-to-Door Campaign

Seven of our hardy Save Burnage Library campaigners volunteers to brave walking in the freezing cold on Saturday 23rd and Sunday 24th March to canvas for campaign support in Burnage door-to-door. To reward the efforts of these tough team, we've had 240 respondents agree to write letters to the council.

Thank you so much to those that volunteered part of their weekend to help with the campaign and deliver leaflets to residents of Burnage.

Kingsway Federation Support

After an email was sent to the heads of the local primary and secondary schools asking for any support they could give, the Kingsway Federation, the governing body running both Green End and Ladybarn primary school's responded with a fantastic letter signed by the chair in support of our campaign, objecting to the closure of Burnage Library.

The chair highlights the desire of parents in the area for their children to do well and gain literacy skills. The letter also highlight the importance of access to library internet resources which would close under these proposals.

The Save Burnage Library campaign team thanks the Kingsway Federation for their wholehearted support.

Details on the Calendar

You'll notice the calendar on the right hand side of the screen. This Google calendar has been added to keep you up-to-date with campaign activities. The following link will open the Save Burnage Library Campaign Calendar.

Upcoming Events

We still have a number of events coming up which all supporters are encouraged to attend:

Albert Square Popup Library (30th March 2013)

Working with the save Levenshulme baths and other library campaigns, Burnage residents are invited to participate in the popup library event taking place outside the town hall on Saturday 30th March 2013. Full details can be found here.

Big Burnage Borrow! (5th & 6th April 2013)

From the afternoon of Friday 5th April 2013 until 1pm on Saturday 6th April 2013, we are taking part in the Big Burnage Borrow. We will be taking out our full allocation of books and keeping them until after the meeting with Sue Murphy on the Saturday (details below). There will likely be a media presence, at the meeting with councillor Murphy and this is a great opportunity for exposure. We would encourage anyone willing to help to come along on either the Friday afternoon or Saturday morning and take out their full allocation of books.

Meeting with Councillor Sue Murphy (6th April 2013)

Burnage Library Campaigners have managed to secure time on Saturday April the 6th in Burnage Library with Councillor Sue Murphy, the deputy leader of Manchester City Council. We will be chairing and presenting our case. There will be an opportunity to ask questions and follow up on some of the actions from the original meeting with the councillors back in February

Presenting Children's Letter to Sir Richard Lees (17th April 2013)

On the last day of the consultation, children and adults from the local area will be presenting Sir Richard Lees with letters objecting to the closure of Burnage library. Details to follow.

The consultation ends on the 17th April, with a decision being made by mid May. We want Burnage Library to remain open and will push until the 17th to support it doing so. Thank you for all the support so far. Keep up the essential support for this campaign!

Save Burnage Library Campaign