KT Peterborough Open+ libraries, Peterborough city council Faced with budget cuts, Peterborough city council needed to reduce its spend on library services.
In Liverpool, despite the big spend on its central library, four branch libraries have shut and others have reduced opening hours.
These falls come alongside a drop of £66m in total spend on council-run libraries, with visits down by 3% year on year, and by 14% over the last five years.
More adults want councils to protect spending on green spaces, including parks and playgrounds, than spending on libraries, youth clubs and helping people find work.
Mr Coates, a former managing director of Waterstone's, a chain of book stores, also says that though spending on libraries is up, visits have declined by 21% and numbers of books borrowed by 35% in the last ten years, making a once public-spirited enterprise bad value for public money.
It would be possible to take a less skeptical view of this well-timed request if Mr. Bush's budget priorities -- driven by unwarranted tax cuts -- had not trickled all the way down to local budgets and gutted, for instance, spending on libraries.
Services for young people and elderly people will be scaled back, and less money will be spent on libraries and leisure centres.
These are critical funds we would otherwise not have, which will be spent on library priorities.
And in August 2013, Henderson called for a sustained "multi-year investment" in staffing and resources and announced that some surplus funds — ultimately $3.4 million — would be spent on library collections.
"If staff are being cut and services being reduced I would not want £200m spent on one library.
