I read the letter from Councillor Reuben Thompstone, Barnet Borough Council’s chairman of the children, education, libraries and safeguarding committee, with interest (‘Story did not give the full picture’, Your Views, October 16).

Cllr Thompstone urges: “Readers of this paper to engage in the public consultation process [i.e. including the library services], so that an informed and relevant model can be developed to maintain the comprehensive and efficient library service that benefits the good people of Barnet.”

Nice words and particularly the use of “comprehensive” and “efficient”. However, I wonder if Cllr Thompstone has actually visited the frontline, i.e. libraries across the borough, and talked to frustrated librarians who have to deal with the public on a daily basis in explaining repeated outages and IT problems affecting public computers in these facilities.

For the record, in recent weeks and months the public computers in many — especially at Chipping Barnet and East Barnet — almost seem to have been held together with ceiling wax and glue. Earlier this month, the computers were down for four days straight. It’s no joke and it was never this bad before the maintenance was outsourced to Capita.

Management appear to be “acutely aware” of the problem but the problems, outages and downtime still persist. Librarians have to field the flak from the public but were in no way responsible for this mess.

Can the good people of Barnet therefore receive an answer to when this situation will be rectified, and has Capita in fact failed in its duty to provide the basic minimum service level agreement? Many residents view it as sub-optimal and that’s putting it mildly.

Roger Aitken

Green Party, East Barnet