MOBILE LIBRARY VANS
I am asked on many occasions what I and / or the Harris Councillors are doing to further the case for the replacement of the fleet of mobile library vans which are so vital in rural areas such as Harris and South Lochs. So I thought I would share with you the presentation I made to the Communities and Housing Committee in Chamber on Tuesday 24 April.
“ Most members here will recall my passionate defence of the mobile library service in a note I sent out on 09 March on behalf of the Community in Harris & South Lochs - one of many members of the Community reflecting the strong feelings of the lonely / the isolated / the elderly / the disabled who are hugely dependent on this lifeline service.
At that time I noted that it had then to go through three Committee stages before any concrete decision could be made - continuous improvement on 04 April : Communities and housing committee today and possible further consideration at Policy & Resources next Wednesday. As part of the continuing exercise by the Council to look in more detail at service redesign in order to get more value for money, many members are saying that the service has to justify itself much more by performing other tasks - I know money is tight and has to carefully managed but since when did support to the most vulnerable parts of our Island Community require such justification. I would ask for support from Councillors from those rural areas as well as others of course to support the reinstatement of those mobile library vans with some urgency.
There are two major implications that I can see if we were to abandon this sector of Society and not replace the Library Vans - one - possibly the least important - and that is our credibility in Harris & South Lochs diminishes - but in all matters of local politics you expect to win some arguments and lose others - the next implication I think is much more serious and that is there is a widely held perception by many of the Community of Harris and South Lochs ( and maybe other rural Communities in LEWIS / Uists and Barra - I don’t know ) that the Comhairle is Stornoway driven and any rhetoric offered up to defend rural initiatives - such as mobile library Van replacement - is simply rhetoric with no action to back it up. By voting against replacements of those Vans and demanding ever more justification for them being on the road would only play into the hands of those doubters who believe that the so called “ rural dimension “ counts for nothing. For those reasons I would urge my fellow members to give serious consideration to voting for replacement.
Whilst I do get caught between the two stools of justification of an expensive resource as against the protection of a critical rural service, I do feel that the time is has taken to come to a decision is quite unacceptable. Alasdair Allan MSP asked about the mobile library vans as far back as June 2017 with a similar request made by the ex-Harris Councillor KENNY MacKay Renegidale as far back as August 2017.
Cllr John Mitchell, Harris and South Lochs
