Acocks Green’s popular local Library has had its opening hours kept at the current level of 50 hours per week, following a decision taken at last Thursday’s Yardley Constituency Committee. The Committee voted to allocate £12,139 of Acocks Green’s 2012/13 Community Chest funding to pay for the 10 hours a week that had been put at risk following a central review of opening hours of libraries across the City. This keeps opening hours unchanged until October, by which time we will have carried out a full consultation of local residents and community groups to assess the optimum level of opening hours for the Library.

I believe that keeping Acocks Green Library open 6 days a week is very important for the local community and I’m delighted that we have been able to fund this, and go one step further and eliminate the need for any reduction at all in opening hours for the next 6 months. Like all wards in Birmingham, we have been granted £25,000 extra Community Chest funding for 2012/13. This would allow us (when we come to the next decision in October) to fully fund the current opening hours for the Library for the whole year and still be left with a small increase in Community Chest funding for other projects.

The Labour Councillors on the Constituency Committee tried to stop the motion to allocate the Community Chest funding to the Library from being debated. After that was defeated they then tabled an amendment to cut the extra funding by two thirds. I was very suprised by these moves, which vividly demonstrate that its the Liberal Democrats not Labour who can be trusted by local residents to work to keep our Library open for as many hours as possible.