Who's the big bad wolf that runs Harrow libraries?

Hardly has the ink dried on Harrow Council’s outsourcing agreement with John Laing Integrated Services (JLIS) to run the borough’s libraries, when news arrives that JLIS, along with its Harrow libraries contract, has been swallowed by Carillon for £65 million.

Library staff have not yet had time to get used to their John Laing uniforms and email addresses but will shortly be issued with new ones.

Carillon claims “a sector leading capability in delivering sustainable solutions” but its hard to see how changing uniforms benefits staff or customers. At the very least, the cost of corporate vanity must be paid for by sacrificing other expenditure.

The main evidence of JLIS’s contribution to the library service since taking over in September (apart from new staff uniforms) is the denial of online access to the library catalogue and library accounts for several weeks, while it upgrades the system. The Harrow website says only that there will be “some minor disruption to subscribers for a limited time”.

Carillon has bought JLIS to widen its capabilities by acquiring sector experience it did not possess. This is somewhat ironic because John Laing Integrated Services itself had little experience in the library sector when it secured the Harrow contract. It had previously only managed libraries in Hounslow.

Thus Harrow libraries have entered a new era. The era of the blind leading the blind. Up a blind alley.

The way this apparently works is that the private sector company takes over dedicated public sector staff, lets them show the company how to run libraries, and then progressively makes them redundant. The libraries are restaffed with poorly paid, unqualified workers, led by one of the “sector leading contractor” managers who learned on the job from the people who would be pushed out. It’s called restructuring.

Harrow library staff were unceremoniously moved from public sector security to private sector uncertainty, and have now been moved on again. It’s how money is made. The cynical nature of this disposal of public sector business is underlined by the statement from John Laing PLC, of which John Laing Integrated Services (JLIS) was a part:

"JLIS has made significant progress over the last few years, but it no longer fits within our core strategy.”

It goes with saying that they knew this when the contract was signed with Harrow.