Farewell to Fines

We are delighted to announce that we will no longer be charging overdue fines. Any outstanding fines and invoices on member accounts will also be waived and will not be payable.

This is one of a series of measures introduced by the library to help support our members through the Cost-of-Living crisis.

Your wellbeing matters to us and our ongoing commitment to delivering an exceptional library experience means we want to support our members in any way we can during these challenging times. The library supports members in continuing professional development, evidence-based practice and research by providing access to high quality resources. We don’t want anyone to be prevented from accessing the information they need because they cannot pay a library fine.

Libraries normally charge fines to encourage people to return books on time thereby ensuring they are available for others to borrow at point of need. For this system to continue to work without fines in place, we ask you to be considerate of your colleagues and support this endeavour by returning books on time, particularly any that are recalled to satisfy other member requests.

FAQs

If someone has a book I need to borrow, what’s their incentive to return if there are no fines?

If you have a book on loan that is requested by another user and you don’t return it, you can’t borrow or request any more items until it is returned. We hope this will encourage users to return their books for further circulation to fellow users.

What happens if I lose a book?

Replacement charges will still apply for lost books. You can find out more about that on our fines section on our Using the Library – Books webpage.

Does this apply to just books, or to everything?

This applies to all standard loan items.