Somerset council to close 11 libraries and cut hours at 20 more

Somerset council will close 11 of its 30 libraries by next April and cut opening hours at 20 of the remainder, after its cabinet voted on Wednesday to accept a package of savings that officers said was the least damaging of three options on the table.

The branches to close are in Wiveliscombe, Cheddar, Castle Cary, Somerton, Highbridge, Watchet, Dulverton, Langport, Milborne Port, North Petherton and Porlock. Together they issued 410,000 items last year and are used, the council’s own figures show, by 31,000 people a month. The 20 surviving branches outside Taunton, Yeovil and Bridgwater will open three days a week instead of five.

The council, which has been under a financial emergency since 2023, says it must find £35m of savings this year and that its spending on adult social care has risen from £192m to £231m in two years, driven by the cost of care home places and a 14% rise in the number of over-85s in the county. Libraries cost £8.1m a year; the closures and cuts save £3.4m.

“Nobody on this cabinet came into local government to close libraries,” said the council leader, Graham Tilley. “We came in to run a county, and a county where 54p of every pound we spend goes on social care has to make choices that would have been unthinkable 10 years ago. The alternative on the table was to stop every discretionary service at once.”

The council has offered each of the 11 communities the chance to run its library as a volunteer-led “community library partnership”, with the building rent-free and a one-off grant of £15,000 but no paid staff and no stock budget after the first year. Four parish councils have expressed interest. Others say the model is a sham. “A library without a librarian is a room with books in it,” said Hazel Trott, who chairs the Friends of Wiveliscombe Library and has used the branch since it opened in 1962. “We have 14 volunteers and an average age of 71. We will do it because we have to, and we will do it badly compared with what we have now.”

Campaigners in Wiveliscombe and Cheddar have instructed a solicitor to examine whether the consultation, which ran for eight weeks over the summer holidays and attracted 7,200 responses, met the council’s duty under the Public Libraries and Museums Act 1964 to provide a “comprehensive and efficient” service. A judicial review of similar closures in another county was successful in 2019.

The county’s MPs have written jointly to the culture secretary asking for the department to use its power to inquire into the plan. A Department for Culture, Media and Sport spokesperson said the secretary of state had received the letter and would consider it.

The cuts also end the mobile library service, which visited 140 villages on a three-week cycle and will make its final rounds in March. The council says the home delivery service for housebound readers will continue.