LIBRARY staff across the county are set to strike over plans they say will cost jobs and result in a poorer service for users.

Union officials have confirmed they will be holding a formal ballot of several hundred employees and expect support for industrial action which could see many of the county’s 106 libraries hit by closures.

The move has come after talks aimed at settling differences between staff and managers over the shake-up broke down.

Staff are unhappy the changes will downgrade the status of professional librarians, add to the workload of less well-qualified staff and leave users with less access to specialists.

It has emerged that some library assistants and other front-line staff could be effectively “demoted” in the re-organisation and unions say the number of fully qualified librarians would fall by about a third.

Unison’s library group secretary Marion Beatty said: “Although we are meeting regularly with management, it is difficult to avoid the impression they are not listening to what we are saying.”

While staff agreed with the idea of taking library services out into the community, KCC’s plan meant “the public is being asked to pay the price in terms of loss of accessibility and expertise at the point of library use – and no-one is telling them this,” she added.

The county council has denied its shake-up, called Transforming Kent’s Libraries, will dumb down the service and says only a handful of staff are likely to lose their jobs.

It wants to create new “community librarians” who could spend less time working at larger town libraries and more in some of the county’s smaller libraries.

In a statement, KCC’s cabinet member for libraries Cllr David Brazier (Con) said the review would mean more staff serving the public.

“We are extremely disappointed that Unison have threatened strike action. We have made changes to our proposals in the light of their comments and are still in consultation. The key objective is to improve library services for the people of Kent and it is by no means a cost-cutting exercise or a ‘dumbing-down’ of the library service,” he said.

If staff support action, it is understood the first strike is likely to take place at the end of May.

KM-fm's Ally Barnard has more...