Those who watch the pages of the dailies for public library stories with the zeal of an owl in search of voles, seem to have missed Saturday's Financial Times (one article can be viewed free without registration, ten a month if you've registered) which runs a story on the future of lottery funding. Though one could argue that there is something fitting about public libraries, gateways to knowledge, being funded out of a tax on stupidity, there has always been a danger that lottery funding could be seized on by councils as an easy way out of avoiding their responsibilities to fund a comprehensive service. The Big Lottery Fund has clear guidelines about what they will and will not fund. But as public expenditure decreases, so the boundaries will blur.
There is a further danger: if the population at large were to become statistically literate, then the lottery income would fall yet further.
