Following the previous post on overall funding of the British Library, DSHR pointed out that the 2006 bump was largely down to an unusually high level of donations. So I decided to spend some time going back through the annual reports and recording the breakdown of the different funding streams.
It’s probably worth noting that the GOV.UK site does not have all the annual reports, and I had to dig around in the Internet Archive Wayback Machine to get some of them.
Income Streams#
The precise naming of the various sources of funds do shift a little from year to year, but the overall classification is pretty consistent. The overall income streams are:
- Grant-in-Aid (GIA): the official term for the core funding from the UK government.
- Voluntary: covering all voluntary contributions and donations, including the valuation of donated collection items.
- Investment: returns on savings and investments.
- Services: income from service delivery within the remit of being a charity. The main part of this over the years has been the document supply service, which started out as the National Lending Library for Science and Technology.
- Other: anything that doesn’t fit into the above categories.
I’ve added this breakdown to the BL Funding Over Time Google Sheet, and also added a column converting each source into Year 2000 equivalent figures, in the same was a before.
The Funding Breakdown#
With these adjusted figures in place, the funding breakdown looks like this…
This makes it clear that the Voluntary, Investment and Other contributions are usually pretty small, but quite variable. In other words, not something you can necessarily rely on year to year.
Major Trends#
The overall drop in the value of the Services part of the Library’s work is also clear. The document supply business has been slowly dwindling over the years, and this has been a source of concern within the Library for a long time. Over the time frame shown here, the drop in income is roughly £20 million, which represents about a fifth of the total income of the library. In that period, the parts of the business that deliver that service have been scaled back as much as possible, but anecdotally at least, this has not been enough to cover the shortfall.
The breakdown makes the trend in Grant-in-Aid funding much clearer. As one might expect, the real-terms funding of the library peaked in 2007. There have been some positive gains more recently, but nowhere near enough to offset the long drop of the austerity years.
Final Funds#
As of 2023/2024, the library’s real-terms Grant-in-Aid funding is 85% of what it was in the year 2000, and just 74% of the 2007 peak. This, combined with the drop in Services activity, means that the total income in 2023/2024 was just 66% of what it was in 2007.
In other words: do much, much more, with one third less.
That’s a hell of a lot of ’efficiency savings'.