Labour Library Closure Shock

12.28.29pm BST (GMT +0100) Wed 5th Aug 2009

Streatham Library is on Labour's "hit-list"

Labour are up to their old tricks and have plans to close much-loved Libraries up and down the borough.

The latest cull of what Labour Leaders feel are out of date and old fashioned institutions comes just a decade after they tried to close the Durning library in Kennington, the Minet library in Camberwell and the Carnegie library in Herne Hill. Liberal Democrats joined enraged local residents to defeat the plan and the Friends of Lambeth Library movement was born.

Sadly Labour still managed to pick-off and close two smaller libraries - the Streatham Vale library and the Clapham Park library. This was later to be their undoing when Government targets for resident proximity to a fixed library led Labour Lambeth to be marked down in its cultural services review of the Audit Commission's star rating system.

Now Labour is taking the pruning saw to libraries again. Hidden away in a 500-page appendices to a recent Lambeth Cabinet Report are even more wide ranging and explicit plans to close libraries.

The report into Council-owned assets grades various buildings according to condition, running costs, and likely life-span - and adds one or two pithy comments as well.

Top of the hit-list is Herne Hill's Grade Two Listed Carnegie library which the report recommends is surplus to requirements and adds, tellingly, that it could usefully be transformed into luxury flats. Kennington's equally historic Durning library is also singled out for censure and closure while the Minet in Camberwell which houses the Borough's treasured archives but has been otherwise run-down under Labour rekindles the trio of library closures that Labour has always wanted.

However this is not the limit of Labour's library closing ambitions this time round. Singled out for the first time in 2009 is the Streatham Tate Library which Labour complains is expensive to operate - completely neglecting to mention that it is also one of the best used libraries in the borough and has had very little spent on its upkeep.

Even more surprising is the damning conclusion that Norwood library's Nettlefold Hall - one of the very few post-war purpose-built halls in the borough for staging performances, exhibitions and meetings - is surplus to requirements.

This depressing and thoroughly defeatist report was voted through by Labour Cabinet members who barely allowed any voices of opposition to be heard, let alone have the future of such vital public assets debated intelligently.

Labour's philistine intentions are now laid bare for all to see. It is just a question of when they take the saw to cut off the limbs of our community - before or after the next Council elections in May 2010.