Hackney councillor Jon Burke wants libraries to lend out power tools and kitchen appliances
“Essentially I want to pilot a physical lending library”: Cllr Jon Burke
A Hackney councillor wants local libraries to lend out electrical appliances ranging from power tools to bread makers.
Councillor Jon Burke, the cabinet member in charge of library services, said the scheme would mean people would not have to buy their own devices, thereby cutting waste and the cost of living.
He said he wanted to launch the service as soon as possible and suggested residents could donate their possessions, which would then be safety checked before being put into circulation for the common good.
In the case of particularly popular types of item, the council could buy multiples to meet demand, he said.
Cheerleaders for capitalism might argue such endeavours reduce consumer choice, however, and could potentially harm the economy and reduce VAT tax receipts.
Cllr Burke said: “Essentially I want to pilot a physical lending library through which people will be able to come and borrow items they would otherwise have to buy.
“The main purpose of this is to reduce upstream waste, but it would also have an impact for the people who are at the margins.
“If they need a drill, for example, they wouldn’t need to have to go out and purchase one.”
Environmental groups like Friends of the Earth regularly point out the wastefulness of private consumption of material goods, arguing high levels of consumerism and private ownership of resources are unsustainable and destroy nature, for example through mining for metal components.
They say sharing machines among households, rather than each one buying its own, means fewer greenhouse emissions being released into the atmosphere. Car-pooling is an obvious example of this.
“If you’ve got people coming round on the weekend and you want to bake bread, why not have a breadmaker in a physical lending library?” Cllr Burke said.
“With something you’re not using four or five days a week, it seems to make abundantly good sense to me that you would borrow those items on a one off basis, and I think the ideal location for this kind of enterprise is in the library service.”
But Tim Knox, director of the influential free market thinktank Centre for Policy Studies, said he was “very sceptical” about Cllr Burke’s idea and questioned whether buying bread makers or power tools on the public’s behalf would be a good use of a council’s resources in straitened economic times.
He said: “It’s pretty hard to see how libraries would be able to look after these kinds of products and update them often enough.”
He added he was not altogether opposed to sharing goods – provided this was delivered by the market rather than the state.
“It’s important to say this already happens to an extent in the sharing economy,” Knox told the Hackney Citizen. “There is a sort of Airbnb type service which lets you rent your neighbour’s power tool for a very small amount, so the market is already responding to this and I imagine it would respond far more effectively than a council that has no real expertise in this area.”
A lengthier version of the Hackney Citizen’s interview with Cllr Jon Burke will be published shortly
I totally agree with Tim Knox. Another point being that the council needs to sort out the internal corruption within it’s various departments before venturing in another waste of council taxpayers money, whereby the opportunities for corruption ie Councillors buying goods for themselves and not giving them to the Library at all, are bound to happen. I have never known a council that actively seeks to lower the quality of life of its residents on a regular basis and continuously get away with it.
Tim If you can do anything, get the Police or SFO to investigate these criminals!
For the purposes of clarity, the council is talking to North London Waste Authority about financing the scheme and, subject to the appropriate checks, stock could also be acquired through donations.
It’s also extremely important to remember that waste solutions cost the council a great deal of money, so reducing the amount of waste processed represents a financial saving for the council.
As for the contribution of a fee-market ideology that regards the planet as an inexhaustible supply of resources – irrespective of what climate science tells us – I think readers will be able to draw their own conclusions. What I will say, however, is that if the market was the panacea Mr Knox believes it to be, my surgeries wouldn’the be full of hardworking people who can’t afford to put a roof over their children’s heads…
I completely disagree with Tim knox and the Centre for Policy Studies. In fact, in many places, lending libraries have become profitable social enterprises and therefore represent a form of ‘sustainable’ free market thinking. To really make this work, it must be very well designed service to make it better, cheaper and more fun for people to use. Well done Councillor Jon Burke for spearheading such a forward thinking initiative, and make sure you work with some top service designers to ensure it is successful and a model for other local councils.
“hardworking people who can’t afford to put a roof over their children’s heads…”
And when we do manage to put a roof over our heads, we have it destroyed by criminal head of planning Femi Nwanzi who wrote
“The proposal would adversely affect light and outlook to the rear of these properties to an unacceptable degree, reducing the quality of life of these residents”
and
“The perception of being severely overlooked would be very intrusive and harmful to the amenities of those residents”
Then she “Mislaid” all refusals from herself and the Secretary of State and passed an almost identical project by presenting a misleading and falsified approval to the NC (4 days before the deadline she gave to objectors). She allowed to it to be in breach of planning and has more recently granted permission to extend the project by another floor. The difference between the one she refused and the one she passed was 8 inches.
She then tried to run a smear campaign which backfired on her proving herself to be the lying manipulating criminal that she really is.
As a reward for her crimes “this case is the tip of the iceberg” (former councillor Sylvia Anderson), She has been promoted to head of planning. Showing that criminality gets rewarded in Hackney Council.
I doubt that lending a kettle to somebody in Hackney would harm GDP too much.