Devonjim:
Registering libraries as charitable companies still leaves the difficulties of finding adequate finance and may even aggravate it. Councils would no longer be obliged to provide finance, so where is the money going to come from? The majority of libraries no longer have to provide a reference section, a lending section, and possibly a record office/archive (as in the case of the Library of Birmingham), but also a huge internet cafe (for want of a better expression).
The larger the library, the bigger the costs. In the "good old days", i.e. pre-internet, businesses could perhaps be persuaded to finance the reference section, but that is certainly not the case today. They can find most of the information they want from the internet & subscriptions, whereas previosuly they used libraries and that now defunct, but excellent government body, the Export Department of the Board of Trade.
I would like to see a breakdown of who uses the lending library - largely fiction, I suspect, and predominantly the elderly and youngsters, but I could be wrong. The domain of the record offices is very very slowly being digitised by private companies such as Ancestry, FindMyPast, & Google and made available on a subscription basis. I have no problem with that as those that use it pay for it. The staff of the record offices see it somewhat differently as their jobs are slowly disappearing and they have made that plain in meetings with FreeReg.
That leaves the "internet cafe", and as both central and local government bodies are putting more of their interface with the public online, central government has an obligation to to provide access to people who don't have or choose not to have personal computers of some form or another. But I see many of the computer terminals in public libraries being used by out-of-work teens to access Facebook and other social media. Should local government really have an obligation to provide this sort of entertainment?
To sum up, I don't see the formation of charitable companies solving the all important problem of finance.
Maurice