Issue - meetings

The Department of Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) published a revised set of ‘Public Library Byelaws for England’ in March 2025 (updated August 2025).

DCMS state library byelaws are aimed at helping libraries to offer a “safe and comfortable environment and to make libraries places everyone can enjoy”. They also aid the “library workforce to deal with disruptive behaviour and allow for flexibility in dealing with local concerns”.

BCP Council has not updated its library byelaws since local government review and thus we are still operating with separate versions in place for the legacy authority areas.

The library service would like to update its byelaws to bring consistency across areas, but also because the new version produced by the DCMS are more modern and a better fit for life as it is today. 

This report presents the draft byelaws and seeks support to undertake the necessary next steps to enable us to adopt them.