‘I might lose my library job under Bucks Council cuts but I’m told to keep quiet’

A Buckinghamshire library worker who may lose their job under planned council cuts has said they and their colleagues have been told to keep quiet about the plans in front of customers.

Buckinghamshire Council has said it will save £555,000 a year under a new plan, set to be introduced from Spring at its county libraries in Amersham, Aylesbury, Beaconsfield, Buckingham, Chesham, Hazlemere, Marlow and Princes Risborough.

Dubbed ‘Library Flex’, the plan will see opening hours extended at county libraries by using self-service technology to enter the building and borrow books, while volunteer groups will be encouraged to use the libraries when there are no staff on site.

Up to 20 staff could be laid off under the council’s plans, meaning staffed hours are set to be reduced by between 25 and 30 per cent.

However, a staff member in one of the affected libraries said there was a huge ‘discrepancy’ between what the council was saying in private and in public about the plans.

The individual, who wished to remain anonymous, claimed that the council had tried to limit the number of people who responded to its consultation on the plans, which ended earlier this month.

They told the Local Democracy Reporting Service: “They said, ‘please don’t discuss details of this within earshot of customers’. It did really feel like they were trying to get as few responses as they could.”

A ‘restructure’ of the 152 staff in the council’s library service is planned for January, with the council saying that it anticipates fewer than 20 redundancies ‘in terms of posts’.

However, the anonymous member of staff said they had been told by different managers that the council could lay off anywhere from 20 to 45 per cent of staff.

They said: “I am pretty worried about where I will actually be able to find work if I don’t have a job.”

On top of this, some library staff have apparently been told that their jobs will ‘stop existing’ next year and that the current workforce will have to reapply for a completely new list of roles.

The staff, some of whom have been there for over a decade, have also reportedly been told that they will not be allowed to take voluntary redundancy.

“They seem very, very reluctant to actually tell us what the staffing situation will be until the last possible minute,” the anonymous worker added.

“There was a whole thing about them being like, ‘oh well we need to wait until after Christmas because we don’t want to spoil Christmas with bad news’.”

The individual said it was ‘frustrating’ trying to get information about the future of their role and that the advice given out was ‘inconsistent’.

Besides this, senior library bosses are said to have admitted that the council’s plans to extend opening hours were actually ‘unrealistic’ and ‘impractical’.

“They are telling us that it is not actually likely that there will be extended opening hours,” the staff member said, “I am not happy with that being the official way they are portraying it.”

They added: “Myself and everyone I have spoken to in the library service has the impression from people we have spoken to and the feedback forms that we have received in person, that pretty much all of the feedback we have received has been very, very negative.”

However, Clive Harriss, the council’s cabinet member for culture and leisure, claimed that library service managers had provided regular briefings to staff on the developing Library Flex proposals and that public statements were ‘consistent’ with information given to staff.

The council said it could not confirm an exact number of redundancies or whether staff would have to reapply to a list of new jobs.

Cllr Harriss said: “The concerns listed are based on incorrect information: the proposals are based on extending opening hours through the use of self-operated technology and a reduction in staffing hours of 25-30 per cent, while ensuring that staff are available, including for council access point enquiries, during peak times.

“Council access point online and phone services will remain available during the unstaffed hours, which will increase as we move to longer opening hours. Similarly, safety measures including emergency/panic buttons are central to our proposals.”

The cabinet member pointed out that similar versions of the ‘Library Flex’ model were already operating in 45 other areas across the country, including Milton Keynes and Surrey.

He added: “We fully understand that staff will be feeling unsettled until we are in a position to share detail around the proposed staffing changes, which unfortunately is not possible until we have analysed the consultation responses.

“The introduction of a new delivery model will require a change to our staffing structure, and this will unfortunately include a reduction in the number of staff posts.

“The council’s policy is to work with staff to identify alternative roles elsewhere in the council wherever possible.”