Council to retake decision on community-run libraries after High Court ruling

Surrey County Council is to retake its decision to proceed with plans for ten libraries to be run by community volunteers.

The announcement comes after Mr Justice Wilkie earlier this month ruled in the High Court that the council’s original decision in September 2011 was unlawful because there should have been more information about equalities training for volunteers. 

In its initial response to the judgment, Surrey argued that it was simply a ‘technical challenge’, adding that the judge had not criticised the policy itself.

The High Court judge was set to decide on what should happen next at a hearing in May.

But Surrey has now said that it had carefully considered Mr Justice Wilkie’s judgment and felt it was “not in the best interests of library goers or taxpayers to return to court”.

The council’s lawyers will now work with the claimants’ solicitors on the wording of a consent order.

Surrey said the proposal would be brought back to a Cabinet meeting on 19 June, “when it will consider all the work that has been done to develop a comprehensive training package for volunteers”.

A further consultation about equalities training for volunteers will be carried out before the meeting in June.

Helyn Clack, Surrey County Council’s Cabinet Member for Community Services and the 2012 Games, said: “Our aim all along has been to keep all 52 of Surrey’s libraries open while elsewhere in the country branches are closing. Allowing communities to run libraries enables us to do this and it is still the council’s policy.

“Although the council had done a lot of work to develop equalities training, the High Court ruled there should have been more detail in the Cabinet’s papers about it at the meeting last September, so we are going to take the decision again, with all the information we need about volunteer training.”

Cllr Clack insisted that a “huge amount” of work had already gone into ensuring volunteers were properly trained to help all library users. “I’m certain that this training would enable volunteers to provide an excellent service,” she said. “There are a lot people eager to begin running their local library.”

Surrey Libraries Action Movement (SLAM), the campaign group which brought the judicial review proceedings, welcomed Surrey’s decision but said it would wait to see what the proposed consent order contained.

In a statement on its website, SLAM said: “Council leader, David Hodge, has said he will attempt to take the decision again at the Cabinet meeting on 19 June. We will be looking for evidence at this meeting that the Council has evaluated the benefits of paid staff to library users so that it can then understand the impact of losing them. Once it has understood this impact it can only then decide whether training of volunteers can mitigate the loss of paid staff, whether something other than training is required, or indeed whether the gap is too big to be filled by a rota of volunteers.”

The campaign group said the only way to analyse the benefits of paid staff to library users was to ask the library users themselves, by way of a full and open-minded user consultation.

“We would expect to see evidence and results of such a consultation presented to the Cabinet meeting on 19 June,” it added. “Our view is that it would be extremely difficult to replace the benefits of paid staff with only volunteers but, if David Hodge is as insistent on the policy as he seems, then we expect to see ‘substantial’ evidence at the Cabinet meeting to justify it.”