CROYDON IN CRISIS: Residents, library campaigners and members of the council’s scrutiny committee have all seen through the council’s dodgy recommendations for reducing the borough’s library service. And with the council running at £42m over-budget for this year, further closures cannot be ruled out, reports STEVEN DOWNES

Closure plan: Bradmore Green Library is a locally listed building that Mayor Perry wants to close and sell

In all of the discussions about the fate of Croydon’s public library service, there have been a number of things made absolutely clear. One is that the policy-makers at the council are a disorganised, shambolic mess.

Another is that there remains a high level of opposition among residents to even the suggestion that any of the borough’s 13 public libraries should close. This finding is even included in the report from the council’s expensively hired consultants, which the council belatedly released ahead of tonight’s Town Hall cabinet meeting.

Tonight, Jason Perry, Croydon Tory Mayor, and his coterie of Conservative chums will rubber-stamp an ill-conceived and unplanned scheme to shut the doors on Shirley, Bradmore Green, Sanderstead and Broad Green libraries, closures all to be rushed through before the end of next month. There’s a sense that the haste is to get the dirty deed done before anyone has an opportunity to challenge the decision, and so take the four buildings past the point of no return.

Another piece of clarity around this process has been the absolutely dreadful presentation of the proposition, both by council officials and politicians.

Maybe, just maybe, had they managed to get their messaging right in the first place, their plans – such as they are – might have received a more sympathetic hearing. It would also have helped if council officials, and the borough’s Mayor, had been honest about their intentions from the start.

No real plans: council staff Kristian Aspinall (centre) and Stephanie Wilson often had their lack of preparation exposed by the scrutiny committee. Cabinet member Andy Stranack (right) simply offered his endorsement

The messaging could have been much different, much sooner. The council is in a deep, dark financial hole, and it is getting deeper by the day. Croydon has a legal duty to provide a public library service, and has 13 libraries to serve its growing, and youthful, population.

But since covid in 2020, and the council’s financial collapse later that year, only one of the borough’s libraries, Central, has been operating anything like “normal” opening hours. In 2020, £800,000 was cut from the libraries’ operating budget, making it impossible to staff a proper library service across all 13 libraries.

Six libraries are open just three days each week. These include Sanderstead, one of those earmarked for closure. Another five of the libraries open on just two days a week – including Bradmore Green in its locally listed building in Old Coulsdon, Shirley Library and Broad Green Library.

Two days a week is not a library service. It’s lip service.

At last week’s meeting, Alisdair Stewart, Perry’s hand-picked deputy chair of the scrutiny committee, asked, “I understand in terms of our current service we’re at risk of breaching our Best Value Duties. Why are we at risk of failing this currently and how will these proposals enable the council to demonstrate our library service as proposed here would fulfil that Best Value Duty?”

The council’s “director of culture and community safety”, Kristian Aspinall, tried to explain. “Some of these buildings are only open two days a week, and in terms of justifying the spend on those buildings, because obviously we’re spending money on them every day even if they’re only open two days a week, that’s not delivering Best Value for residents.

“It is fair to say that we hoped… to provide more opportunities to open those buildings. But the fact is, since making these changes two and half years ago, we have not been successful in doing that. And that is down to, primarily, lack of interest in those areas for rental agreements or hires, and… when we’ve approached statutory partners, that has also not been top of their list for where they would want to place sites.”

By concentrating on nine libraries, instead of spreading the diminished resources across 13 buildings, there is a possibility of opening for five, even six, days a week in those libraries that remain, with opening hours that actually suit residents.

You could almost sense the desperation among senior council staff last week, when Aspinall revealed that the council now has so few library staff, “If I have two staff go off sick on the same day, I have to close a building.”

In Croydon, librarians, who are expected to be in tune with their library, the neighbourhood it serves and their library users, are currently having to work across three different locations during the course of a week. “At the moment, everybody is literally spinning plates in order to keep the buildings open,” said Aspinall (who probably doesn’t understand the meaning of “literally”).

A re-focusing of resources might be an argument that could win over some more reasonable residents, perhaps, especially if there was some evidence that the council had thought about their proposition seriously and come up with some other actions that could make a library service operating out of fewer buildings work for everyone.

Restricted: there’s a legal covenant over the use of Shirley Library. The council has failed to provide its legal advice

But they haven’t.

Three hours were spent at last week’s scrutiny meeting, agonising over the stark absence of detail and preparation in the council’s so-called plans for what they call “mitigation” for the users of those four libraries facing closure.

What has the council done – in the year or more since they instigated this consultants’ report and public consultation – to identify possible groups to take on the buildings and to run libraries and other services there? “Are there any community groups you can name, who definitely have plans for alternative venues? Or any community groups who are definitely going to be taking over… a community asset transfer of a library?” asked Councillor Rowenna Davis.

Aspinall answered: “Until the decision is made, we cannot commit to any takeover of a building, until we’ve made that decision… we have to go through that step before we can then look at what the future use of the asset is.”

So that’s a no then.

Pompous: Mayor Perry is now saying there’s no plan to sell the libraries. When there is

Mayor Perry is often accused of being pompous, but that sometimes manifests as a petulant streak, and that came to the fore last week.

His strategy, it has been transparent from early in this whole process, has been to set residents against residents, “the haves” against “the have nots”. In 2024, there has been no concerted, borough-wide opposition to the closure proposals, as there were over previous closure plans aired by previous Tory- and Labour-run councils.

At the scrutiny meeting, one committee member explained how they had been listening to the concerns of groups from the four libraries that Perry has doomed to closure. “Have you spoken to the nine libraries that are being enhanced?” Perry shot back, his nasty streak on display for all to see.

With each successive page of the council’s recommendations, more holes were being discovered, more contradictions, more nonsense.

The council would quite like voluntary groups or others to take on the running of the four soon-to-be-abandoned libraries, they claim. To help them do that, it is offering £20,000. Over two years. In total. And that’s it. Mayor Perry can expect to be trouser seven times as much in the same period.

“To be frank the library service has been struggling since the budget cuts of 2019-2021, where over £800,000 reductions were made to the service, resulting reductions in opening hours and making the present service unsustainable,” Perry told the meeting. What he failed to mention was that he had voted for those budget cuts, which were brought in by Labour when he was in opposition.

A week earlier, Perry himself had presided over a little ceremony with the Friends of Shirley Library, presenting a certificate to confirm that their library is an ACV, an Asset of Community Value. Just not of enough value to Perry to keep it open for its intended purpose, as a library.

The Shirley group had also had a meeting with Perry’s colleague, Andy Stranack, the cabinet member responsible for culture. They had raised with him the thorny issue of a legal covenant over the use of the Shirley Library building. Councillor Stranack had claimed that the council has had legal advice that this covenant does not apply. He said he would provide the Friends group with that legal advice. The Friends group is still waiting.

But perhaps most conspicuously absent from Perry and the council officials’ presentation to the scrutiny committee was honesty.

Early in the meeting, Perry had tried to swerve a question from the committee, saying that he would leave the detailed answers to the council staff, like director Aspinall and Stephanie Wilson, the head of libraries.

But it wasn’t long before Perry was interrupting, demanding to put his position.

Perry told scrutiny that the cash-strapped council has no plans to flog off the buildings at Shirley, or Bradmore Green, or Sanderstead or Broad Green, probably to profit-hungry property developers to turn into flats.

“I want to be very, very clear… this is not about asset sales, it’s not about developing sites, this is about reinvestment in the service,” Perry said.

And he interrupted again soon after, to emphasise his point. “Again, this is not about selling sites to developers,” Perry said.

Except that is not true.

In November 2022, less than two years ago, Perry’s cabinet – the same people meeting tonight – passed another report, the ““Corporate Asset Management Plan”, which included £100million of “potential disposals” of council properties. Top of Perry’s list is “Reduction in libraries”.

That report’s recommendations remain in place as current council policy. Mayor Jason Perry’s policy. To sell library buildings.

Property sales: this was part of a November 2022 report from Perry’s council that placed libraries at the top of a list of £100m-worth of asset disposals

“So many aspects of the council’s recommendations just do not stack up,” one library campaigner told Inside Croydon.

“The plans as presented are completely unworkable. There’s more than a sense that the council knows that very well. So if they rush through the closures, and no one comes forward to establish a ‘community hub’, or a library or whatever in Shirley, or Sanderstead, or Bradmore Green or Broad Green, rather than the council spending money on maintenance of these buildings, they will soon turn round and say that they have to sell the properties. ‘Reluctantly’, of course.

“It’s a deception. And it’s dishonest.

“If a group takes on a building it has to be at zero cost to the council. How would this work? Would rent be paid? And how does the community group pay for the uo-keep and running of the building after that miserable £20,000 is spent?

“In the report, it says that the council will use Community Infrastructure Levy money to right any problems with the buildings if capital expenditure is needed before handing them over. But surely any such issues, as exist now, with the buildings under council control, should have already been fixed using that CIL money?

“Despite recommendations for ‘urgent’ and ’emergency’ works at the libraries, and with CIL money providing a budget for the works, no CIL money has been spent on the four libraries selected for closure.”

And another resident who opposes the closures said: “Work to find someone (anyone) to take over the libraries planned to close will only start after the decision is taken.
Likewise for the moment, all the ‘mitigation’ plans – a shuttle bus, home libraries, outreach services – are ‘hypothetical’.”

Asset of Community Value: Shirley Library’s supporters collected their ACV certificate from Mayor Perry

And a third campaigner contacted iC to say: “In the report on the public consultation, it says there is almost universal opposition to closures and the permanent loss of community assets: ‘a large number of consultation participants reject the council’s rationale for the proposed closures’.

“So if the council goes ahead with it’s ill-thought-out closure policy, what was the point of the consultation?”

Thing is, with Perry’s council running over-budget at £42million for this year, even after using up precious reserves and other funds, the need to flog off more assets has become all that more essential.

And it may not be too long before some of the remaining nine libraries have the shutters hauled down and the “For Sale” signs put up outside, too.

Read more: Legal battle expected as Perry to order four libraries to close
Read more: Perry ducks scrutiny over council financials that don’t add up
Read more: Closing libraries is a sign of ‘failed administration’ – say Tories
Read more: ‘The council is dismantling our borough, service by service’

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