Library closures due to staff shortages

“Due to staff shortages Whitchurch Library will be closed today,” Tweeted the Bristol Library service on Monday, 24 July 2023.

It wasn’t a one-off. There have been ever more closures recently. Every day there seems to be another library unavailable either all day or just for lunch because there’s only one staff member employed. Others close for the morning or afternoon.

I don’t know why there are staff shortages and whether it is related to the recruitment freeze the administration implemented last year. I can’t say whether these same patterns are happening in children’s services and adult social care or in housing teams. Do those teams have enough workers? are there shortages elsewhere? I don’t know.

All I know is that daily occurrences lead to patterns over time. We can look at those and see if the effects are disproportionately visible in some libraries more than others.

For those who want to know the results now, I can tell you that Lockleaze library had the equivalent of nearly eight weeks of closures over 20 months. For those living in the city centre, no closures would have been noticed from Central and Bedminster libraries.

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But let’s look at the rest of the libraries. Has provision of the statutory duty for “a comprehensive and efficient library service for all persons” been breached?

Public library services are funded and either run or commissioned by local government…