Skip to main contentSkip to navigation

Gruffalo author Julia Donaldson urges Maria Miller to protect libraries

This article is more than 9 years old
The children's laureate has written an open letter to the new culture secretary asking her to act where Jeremy Hunt would not
Julia Donaldson
'Cutting libraries is a false economy' ... Julia Donaldson, author of The Gruffalo, in a letter to the culture secretary. Photograph: David Cheskin/PA
'Cutting libraries is a false economy' ... Julia Donaldson, author of The Gruffalo, in a letter to the culture secretary. Photograph: David Cheskin/PA

The children's laureate Julia Donaldson, author of The Gruffalo, has begged the new secretary of state for culture, Maria Miller, to step in and protect the UK's embattled public libraries.

In an open letter, published yesterday in the Independent on Sunday, Donaldson pleaded with Miller to take a different course on libraries from her predecessor Jeremy Hunt. About to embark on a six-week tour of the UK's libraries, Donaldson wants to "draw attention to the erosion of the library service which is happening in so many local authorities, and to the current government's utter refusal to intervene or to provide any leadership".

Donaldson said that nearly 250 libraries are currently either under threat of closure or else have been closed or left council control since April this year, while 2,159 library staff posts, out of a total of 20,924, are set to be cut. Despite this, and despite pleas from campaigners fighting to keep their local branches open, Hunt and the libraries minister Ed Vaizey have refused to act, said Donaldson. "When I met with Ed Vaizey in February and asked him why he had not intervened his reply was, 'Because my advisers didn't advise me to.' Could you, in your new post, please give him some guidance from above?" she asked Miller.

"Mr Vaizey also told me that he 'did not accept' that there was any problem in the library service. This may be because he is happy with the idea (now a reality in some areas) of libraries being run entirely by volunteers. I am shocked that he could consider this anything more than a short-term measure," Donaldson said. "Of course volunteers have a role to play, and of course it is preferable to have a volunteer-run library than no library, but what I object to is the tendency to dress this trend up as 'vibrant 21st-century thinking', instead of being honest enough to admit that it is a reluctant response to cuts."

Donaldson asked Miller to consider ring-fencing council spending on children's library services, and to look into the possibility of using some of the education budget for this purpose. "Above all, will you (unlike your predecessor) respond to concerns and complaints, and show some leadership for our young readers?" she said. "If children don't discover what books they like, they are unlikely to become life-long readers, and we are therefore heading for a less literate society. Illiteracy leads to lower skills, greater social problems, higher crime rates, and a country less able to prosper in the global jobs market. So cutting libraries is a false economy. They are the best literacy resource that we have."

The award-winning children's author Alan Gibbons, another vocal libraries campaigner, has also written to Miller since her appointment last week. "I note that you have said it is ' … so important to ensure that books and reading play an important part in children's lives.' I assume that means you will end the damaging actions of your predecessor whose tenure saw library closures and their removal from local authority control, cuts to book funds, reduced opening hours and the sacking of librarians," wrote Gibbons. "I also assume that you will convene at the earliest opportunity a meeting of library users, professional bodies, literacy organisations, authors, librarians' trade unions and other interested bodies to draw up a national plan to promote reading for pleasure. Anything else would surely make those words meaningless."

On Monday, Miller told BBC Radio 4 that libraries had always been funded by local authorities, not central government.
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/sep/10/julia-donaldson-maria-miller-libraries
www.theguardian.com
crawl=CC-MAIN-2022-33
249671
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:34YTQNFENN5V3TVAKG57UPEF3FD6VDWA
<urn:uuid:b55cdf72-4e30-4e13-9c77-0ddd5605c9af>
2022-08-10T05:08:33Z
146.75.33.111
text/html
sha1:LDWZAKEFYIGTHPXAFKSNP2BIMSCAIIJL
<urn:uuid:61ae7b2b-0714-463a-a33c-ac249f53b582>
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/sep/10/julia-donaldson-maria-miller-libraries
response
<urn:uuid:edfcba6a-cbd2-4acc-9e47-c61a4dd5fe06>
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2022-33
publisher: Common Crawl
description: Wide crawl of the web for August 2022
operator: Common Crawl Admin (info@commoncrawl.org)
hostname: ip-10-67-67-91
software: Apache Nutch 1.18 (modified, https://github.com/commoncrawl/nutch/)
robots: checked via crawler-commons 1.4-SNAPSHOT (https://github.com/crawler-commons/crawler-commons)
format: WARC File Format 1.1
conformsTo: https://iipc.github.io/warc-specifications/specifications/warc-format/warc-1.1/