www.stradbroke.org.uk
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February 2012 No.377
Our Library and the Court House As part of the on-going discussions over the future of Suffolk’s libraries, seven pilot groups have been set up to explore local participation in the running of libraries. Stradbroke is part of a pilot group along with Eye and Debenham. Local involvement (mostly Parish / Town Councillors at this stage) covers two distinct areas: Firstly the library service . In December 2011, Suffolk County Council agreed to proceed with an entirely new way of delivering public library services – one that is owned and run by local library groups themselves and works in partnership with the county council as the statutory library authority. The organisation, an “Industrial and Provident Society” (IPS), will be led, ultimately, by a board elected by members of the organisation. In the meantime an interim Board is being set up and will, over the next eighteen months help establish the new IPS and work with local library groups. After that, the board will be elected by the IPS members The Court House The Court House, is only part used by the Library. Now that the Suffolk County Council’s Youth Service has ceased its involvement here, the remaining areas are not used. As the new IPS will only be involved with Library Services the Court House building as a whole would be significantly under used. Suffolk County Council would like to see libraries based in multi use community facilities and the Court House, which is owned by SCC, no longer falls into that category. It is under utilised and that may well create probems in the future as SCC would not necessarily wish to be involved with or continue owning, premises that are not used effectively. We thus might lose the building and/or the Library at some point in the future. For that reason the Parish Council has been exploring ways of ensuring that the Court House remains available for use by our community and with our library as the focal point. At the Parish Council meeting in January, councillors discussed the various ways of achieving this. It was agreed that a working group be set up to continue discussions with SCC who were willing to lease the Court House to either the Parish Council or a community involvement group. The Parish Council’s major concern was weighing up the value of the Court House to the community, whilst ensuring that it did not become a liability in terms of cost. Although further information is needed from SCC the information provided by them for discussion at our Parish Council meeting, indicated that a 99 year lease would be available with break clauses as well as funding via the IPS. If the terms of any agreement with SCC are right for Stradbroke, and help ensure the survival of our library then we would want to proceed. The PC working group will report back at the February meeting and further details will appear in next month’s magazine. A big thank you to everyone who has worked so hard in challenging the original library closure programme – your voices were heard and although there is still a lot of work to be done and decisions made, we feel we are are heading in the right direction. Mike Readman