28/10/2004 - Millom library opening hours to change

Opening hours at Millom Library have had to be changed because of loutish behaviour by a minority of youngsters in the town.

There has been an ongoing problem with the behaviour of some young people outside the library, particularly on Mondays and Thursdays when it stayed open until 7pm.

There have been frequent incidents of verbal abuse and threatening behaviour towards staff and library users and missiles being thrown - at one point a smoke bomb was thrown into the building.

Cumbria County Council has gone to great lengths to resolve the problem by installing CCTV cameras, a personal attack alarm in the library and by issuing staff with individual personal attack alarms and offering them personal safety training.

There have also been meetings with the police, with the local senior school and with local community groups in an effort to put a stop to the behaviour of some youths who have been intimidating both library staff and customers and causing alarm and distress.

Unfortunately the situation has not improved and the library has had to take the decision to end late-night opening for the time being. 

Instead, the library will now remain open until 5pm on Wednesdays where before it closed at 1pm. It will also close at 5pm on a Friday and Tuesdays instead of 5.30pm.

These new opening times will begin on Monday, 1 November.

Roger Bingham, county council cabinet member responsible for libraries, said: 

"Cumbria County Council has had to change the opening hours of the library at Millom because of the activities of a few handful of badly behaved people. We have to put the safety and well-being of library users and library staff first and we have really been left with no choice.

"Compared with many other areas we are fortunate to have relatively few problems with anti-social behaviour around libraries in Cumbria, but we do have a problem in Millom at the moment.

"The only good thing that has been salvaged from this situation is that in changing the opening hours we have been able to keep the library open for an extra three hours until 5pm on Wednesdays."