Library Panic and Secret Council meetings at Northumberland County Council

Council announces the predicted outcome ‘Ten Weeks’ before consultation ends.

With the administration of Northumberland County Council beginning to notice it is running rapidly towards its demise with only 10 decision making Council meetings left before the secret Council has to meet its makers in the form of a local government election. We as laymen are beginning to notice panic setting in at County Hall as well as ever more notice being taken of criticism from both opposition Councillors who are creating better exposure outcomes than the administration due to the secret way this Council acts and the noise from groups such as ourselves and others like ‘the voice of the north team and the planet group’ as the administration swings with the criticism from all sides.


This latest park-full of swings takes the biscuit when it comes to wind bending, with the announcement this week that more cash is to be spent on Morpeth’s new Leisure Centre a cudgel we took up several months ago after reading Labour’s last priced up manifesto, but the swing that is most noticeable is the launch of the new library app that is designed to help cut £200,000 from the service two weeks into a twelve week consultation designed to enable the public to help shape the outcomes for the service into the future.

We noticed that save our libraries campaigners had launched a petition on change.org at the same time the cuts were announced at the one-party cabinet who lord over the County and other groups including us began to openly criticise the well known way in which the current incumbents use consultation to achieve cuts through pre-determined outcomes.

On this occasion the noise on social media has been too much and the Council has announced how your library service is to look well into the future through a major launch of its new app. The use of this app allows professional staff to be cut and the library service be run by a part time volunteer force across most of the County.

This was certainly a strong talk over the dinner table in our house with my family enraged with the gall of it all and when contacting the other laymen it seems universally accepted that we expose the matter in this article.

The newly launched app can be found here and the petition link sits below.

https://www.northumberland.gov.uk/News/2019/Oct/BorrowBox-%E2%80%93-Your-library-in-one-app-is-here.aspx

https://www.change.org/p/northumberland-county-council-stop-northumberland-tories-slashing-your-library-service?fbclid=IwAR2LW3z2CiWhN2gYM2k9ojLw4iqhe-gjc6TGmBmNrFCytWxbkggEU8_iquM&use_react=false