Another victim of the sackings - public libraries

I don't know of any other enterprise where top management and divisional chiefs are changed so frequently

Government reshuffles such as took place at the end of last week are mad, wasteful exercises. I happened to have lunch two weeks ago with Tessa Blackstone, a mid-ranking member of the Government and then the Arts minister. I cannot believe that she had any idea that she was about to be sacked. For we spent the meal discussing her ambitious plans for reforming the public library service. But now it will depend upon Baroness Blackstone's successor, Estelle Morris, who will have her own priorities.

My impression was that Lady Blackstone, now 60, saw modernising the library service as a way of contributing to the public good more effectively than had been possible in her previous jobs. It was one thing to have been a leading light in the Downing Street policy unit in the late 1970s, as she was, or, subsequently, a professor of education or master of Birkbeck College, London, but quite another to put public libraries back on the map. That is something which could benefit every single person in the country. It would have been something of lasting value standing to her name. Which matters. It is not only prime ministers who worry about their place in history.

The incident makes me wonder afresh at the absurdity of frequent government reshuffles. I don't know of any other kind of enterprise where the top management and divisional chiefs, so to speak, are changed so frequently and so abruptly. Government ministers have the effrontery to lecture the rest of us about best practice even though their own working methods are scandalous.

I don't suppose the reform of the public library service crossed the Prime Minister's mind as he replaced ministers who were resigning, and promoted or booted out others. Of course not. Yet the case demonstrates that the turmoil thus caused can be as damaging at the lower levels of government as at the top.

For we don't often think about public libraries; they are just there, aren't they? The only facts I had absorbed in recent years were declining trends in library visits and in loans of books. I had begun to assume that public libraries were dying institutions and that they could no longer play the role they did for me when when I was a boy on Merseyside in the 1940s and early 1950s. In those days, just before the arrival of television, I went to my local public library two or three times a week. Neither school nor home, it was a place to develop my interests beyond the reach of teachers or parents.

However the lesson which the library service has fitfully grasped, and which Lady Blackstone was translating into a coherent plan, is that the ways in which libraries can make direct and indirect use of information technology is truly astounding. What public libraries did for me 50 years ago can be done again on a vaster scale and more imaginatively. Public libraries are not what the Americans would call "sunset" institutions, slowly fading away, as I had supposed, but "sunrise" enterprises, capable of illuminating every area of life. The vision was described by Lady Blackstone in a department of culture document published earlier this year.

Imagine a place which gives access, for life, to an endless supply of books, music and films as well as to the internet. Which you can walk into without anyone questioning you. Which offers as much choice as a department store. Where you can get advice about careers or look for job opportunities online and where you can pay your bills and fill in government forms with the help of staff. All this is possible now, and bits of it are being done in different parts of the country.

The difficulty is that public libraries are orphan institutions. They are run by 149 local authorities. In none of them are they a priority. They are often submerged within large departments. They are funded out of grants from central government, but no money is specifically reserved for them. As a result they can easily be starved of funds. And likewise of leadership, because career prospects are limited. Indeed the present arrangements are almost guaranteed to produce mediocrity - except that a number of talented individuals continue to make a great success out of meagre resources.

The problem is how to create a national library service of high achievement when responsibility is split into 149 different parts. The answer comes towards the end of the department of culture document where it notes that many of the most successful and dynamic library services in the world have at their core a small, focused agency which helps drive change. The examples of Singapore, Holland and Sweden are given. That, I think, is what Lady Blackstone wished to create.

But what happens now is unclear. If reform of the public library system becomes for Estelle Morris the same powerful cause it was for her predecessor, then all well and good. But unfortunately the dynamics of our political system forces the government of the day into fits and starts, into botched reorganisations, into eye-catching initiatives and no follow-through. This is not a party point. The Conservatives were no better. It is the nature of the system. That is the lesson which the reshuffle once again teaches.