Examination of Witnesses (Questions 39
- 50)
TUESDAY 14 FEBRUARY 2006
RT HON
FRANK FIELD
MP, MR CRISPIN
TRUMAN, MR
DAVID BAKER
AND DR
JENNIFER FREEMAN
Q39 Chairman: For the second part
of our session this morning we are now turning our attention to
what might be termed the ecclesiastical estate. I would like to
welcome particularly our colleague, Frank Field, who is Chairman
of the Churches Conservation Trust, and the Chief Executive, Crispin
Truman; David Baker, the Chairman of the Advisory Board for Redundant
Churches; and Dr Jennifer Freeman, Director of the Historic Chapels
Trust, which I believe is also chaired by one of our colleagues,
Alan Beith, who said to me that he was sorry he could not be here
but obviously would be following our discussions with some interest.
The churches comprise a significant proportion of our heritage
and in particular of Grade I listed buildings and you are struggling
to save as many as you can that pass into redundancy. Can you
tell us something about the scale of the problem? How are you
managing to cope with those that you already have? How do you
see the future in terms of the number of churches that are likely
to need help in the future and will be applying to you for assistance?
Mr Truman: I think the question
of redundancies, which is often the question that is asked, how
many redundancies are we going to see in the future, is possibly
a bit of a red herring. There has been a fairly stable number
of churches becoming formally redundant, certainly parish churches
in the last few years, 30 a year. Trevor Cooper, who did submit
evidence to you, has predicted in a study by the Ecclesiological
Society that it might reach 60 a year. It is a difficult game
to predict because when the church is faced with crisis, perhaps
more than any other heritage building, the local community really
comes together to save it. What we do know is there are a lot
of churches at risk and they are hanging on by the skin of their
teeth. Something else that Cooper pointed out in his book is the
decline of participation in churches reflects the wider decline
in public life. What you often see is an historic church now is
the last public building in a community where it has lost its
post office, its pub, its railway station many years ago. That
reflects more a downward drift in commitment to public buildings.
He identified 500 churches that have less than ten adults looking
after them. Local people are completely in charge of these buildings,
they fund them, maintain them and repair them. Sixteen hundred
have only between 11 and 20 people regularly committed to the
building. That is a symbol of the crisis we are facing. There
are a lot of buildings out there really hanging on by the skin
of their teeth.
Mr Baker: There is one interesting
angle on that. The Advisory Board for Redundant Churches deals
only with Anglican churches and we are a reactive body; the Church
Commissioners ask our advice as cases come through to them. As
Crispin says, there is a steady flow. It is quite difficult to
predict reliably whether things are going to get very much better
or very much worse. One tendency we have noticed is for the Church
of England to start doing area reviews of their church facilities,
so instead of dealing with churches incrementally ad hoc,
one here and one there coming up for redundancy in places like
Brighton and Hove, for example, where a deanery-wide study was
undertaken, that creates a lot more business, as it were, and
possibly creates more scope for redundancy. A lot depends on how
it is taken through and what balance is taken locally between
heritage considerations, pastoral considerations and financial
considerations.
Dr Freeman: Could I just say something
about the picture with the non-Anglican churches. It is reckoned
that there are as many non-Anglican places of worship in England
as there are Anglican. It is also thought that a large number
of them are under-listed or under-graded and that is very much
the experience of my organisation. There will be a lot of work
for the new listing surveys in that area. Again, the picture is
of a steady number of redundancies across the board, although
statistics are hard to come by. Certainly the Methodists reckon
that about ten listed buildings a year are becoming redundant.
The Roman Catholics plan to make a lot of redundancies in the
North-West of large churches which are not in centres of residential
population any more. On the other hand, the Baptists do not get
many redundant churches and the three we own are the three highly
graded buildings which they have made redundant.
Q40 Chairman: To what extent can
you anticipate that because presumably you are in conversation
with the Church of England about which churches are likely to
be unable to continue in the long-term? Do you try and work with
them to identify those and plan ahead so you do not suddenly have
large numbers that come to you simultaneously out of the blue?
Mr Truman: The Churches Conservation
Trust takes its buildings from the Church of England so, yes,
indeed we work very closely with the Church Commissioners because
in the end they decide what comes to us. They have predictions.
They do a three yearly survey of dioceses asking them to predict
what might become redundant. I have to say they always give us
a very strong health warning with these predictions. The predictions
for the next three year cycle are of a fairly steady trend. I
think perhaps one alarm bell that they are ringing, which fits
with what David was saying about Brighton, is there are increasingly
large numbers of Victorian, often urban churches that are the
real problem churches that seem to be coming to the end of their
potential for surviving on their own that might start coming to
us and that would be a real problem certainly for us and the other
organisations because they require much larger amounts of money
to turn them round.
Dr Freeman: The Historic Chapels
Trust by its very nature acquires a lot of problem, large churches
and buildings in difficult inner-city situations or remote rural
situations because if a building can find an alternative future
there is absolutely no requirement for our Trust to acquire it.
We take on the difficult buildings and start our regeneration
programme there and then. We also roll-up the functions of the
Advisory Board and the Churches Conservation Trust into one body,
but we are an independent charity. We are not owned by the other
non Anglican denominations. We act independently and we have discretion.
Mr Baker: One of the difficult
things about predicting redundancy (and this is slightly beyond
the remit of my board, but we observe it) is that it depends so
much on local circumstances, local people. You can have a very
good priest who is very much in tune with his congregation and
that will keep a building going longer than might happen if you
had a priest and his congregation who were on different ends,
as it were, of the theological spectrum. You could have strong
leaders, you could have difficulties in congregations, and, moreover,
those circumstances change. Certainly in my years on a diocesan
advisory committee I have seen parishes which looked doomed—people
moved away, others came in, a change of priest and then things
moved up. There is a lot of change bumping along the bottom there.
Mr Field: Chairman, I think there
are two issues. If you look at the Conservation Trust, we have
this huge collection of outstanding buildings and a miniscule
budget, which is actually being cut in real terms, and, as Crispin
said, we do not know what the future trend of redundancies will
be. What we have been trying to do is not only change our role
as a trust, which originally was a William Morris type conception
where you received a building and you set it in aspic—you
did not change anything, you preserved it as it was. We felt that
there is no future for us as a trust which only did that, although
some wonderful buildings are so isolated that is the only thing
you could suggest to do with it. We are trying to think of alternative
ways that buildings might be used, and we are not being very modern
about this. It is really a medieval conception that a community
would actually use the nave of a building, so we are trying to
get back to what these buildings were in their local communities,
but we are also trying to extend our activities and, therefore,
our legal basis so that we do not wait for buildings to come to
us. Are there services that we can jointly provide with what is
called the non-redundant part of the ecclesiastical scene so that
buildings do not end up redundant? There is the idea of an ambulance
service where buildings which are vulnerable can get basic repairs
done, because you cannot expect a congregation with an average
age of 70 to get up ladders and make sure that gutters are cleared.
Is it possible for some kind of service to be provided to local
communities where they might seek quite small grants which prevent
that congregation imploding in on itself? There is an outwork
to be done as well as having to face the real issue, which came
up in your questioning in the earlier session, and that is that
here is this country with this incredible collection of buildings,
if you want to call them "heritage", and yet all of
us somehow think this can be maintained with a miniscule budget,
and it cannot be.
Q41 Chairman: Is it your ambition
to essentially get churches off your books, as it were? You have
got a constant trickle of new buildings coming to you. Are you
trying to get them into a position where they can be self-sustaining
and you no longer have to take responsibility so that you can
direct your attention to new ones?
Mr Field: We are trying to do
two things. We have classified our buildings—Crispin can
tell you more of that—and there are clearly some that, on
reflection, ought not to have come to us and therefore we are
rather keen about whether we can actually find other uses for
them which will be different from the sort of uses that we try
to find for our churches, and there are others, probably at the
top end of the market, which maybe parishes will want to claim
back again. There ought to be a movement here rather than just
a growing stock of buildings, but there are difficulties involved
in that.
Mr Truman: I think that is right.
Actually that widens out back to your question about looking at
what might come to us as we explore, with other organisations
and, indeed, the Church Commissioners, the potential churches
at risk and look at the problem churches. The problem is not only
about lack of money to do repairs; it is about lack of community
capacity. Often the will is there to save the church building
but there is a lack of skills to project-manage, to fund raise,
to look at imaginative alternative uses. That is the situation
now, and I think that has been the situation historically, and
so churches, as Frank says, have come to us that perhaps, if we
had been able as a sector to inject more support, help with repairs,
advice, perhaps hands-on help with fund-raising and practical
interventions at the point in time where things were going wrong,
they could have been kept out of the Trust anyway—they need
never have come to us. I think we are all agreed there is a real
need for capacity building by the sector and you need resources
to do that. As Frank says, we have looked at our estate. It is
a mixed bag of buildings. We think there is a lot of potential.
What is special about churches is that they are essentially beautiful
public buildings, iconic buildings, at the heart of communities
that people love. In many cases we have got local people who are
very keen to do more with a building but are at their wits end
because it is cold, there is no toilet and the seats are hard.
There is a need for some money, there is a need for capacity building,
there is a need for fund-raising and there is a need for imaginative
partnerships, perhaps with regeneration agencies, beyond the normal
usual suspects of a church to think about what uses could go in
there and how we can help perhaps a sub-region address issues
of community development or regeneration. Having said that, what
Frank has also alluded to is that there is a core of church buildings,
some of which are in our care and some of which may well end up
with us, where you will not be able to do that ever. They are
Grade I listed, they are stunning, they are national monuments,
but they are in the middle of a field. You might improve tourism,
you might get more people to visit them but, in the end, they
need central support, they need help from a body like us or another
body, and you will not ever be able to sustain them on their own.
It is about horses for courses, but there is certainly huge potential
to do more.
Mr Field: We are trying to develop
local management agreements where local groups increasingly take
over the running of the church, which we then hope might also
be a model for future vestings that one would think locally about
whether a community would take over its church in a different
legal form rather than it automatically come to us.
Dr Freeman: The Historic Chapels
Trust has been very active ever since it was inaugurated in introducing
community activities into its buildings even before the Lottery
was formed. We always felt that it was somehow a depleting experience
to offer somebody a guide book, tell them to walk round a church
and then come out again after 20 minutes, and that we must offer
something more. Right from the outset we have always put in new
heating, lighting, kitchens, modern loos and facilities so that
these buildings can be used by the local community, and, in order
to do that, we have set up local committees following public meetings,
which normally consist of people who have never had anything to
do with the church or the denomination or that chapel before,
just people who are concerned, and we have managed to graft on
lots of new activities even into the most unpromising buildings.
We have never really found a chapel that we could not regenerate.
There are always half a dozen people out there who desperately
care and will be on the local committee and will ensure there
are open-days, that weddings still continue, that we have a concert,
et cetera, et cetera, throughout the year, without promoting heavy
over-use. We also have a lot of tenancy agreements, such as the
Friends of Kensal Green Cemetery at our chapel in Kensal Green
Cemetery who use that particular chapel on a weekly basis and
also hire it out. This was a building that was derelict until
1997—it was a very early Lottery scheme—and it is
in a cemetery, not the most promising venue for lively activities,
but it has gone like a bomb. It has been wonderful. I feel that
our message is one of optimism and hope, but I do have some concerns
about the future, which I will come to in a minute.
Mr Baker: Could I strike a slight
cautionary note on what is being said in the Churches Conservation
Trust, which is admirable stuff, but the reality is that outstanding
churches of outstanding merit will continue to become redundant
and will continue to move to the Churches Conservation Trust.
The scope of many of the churches that they have for accepting
alternative uses without damaging that interest is limited and
there are going to be a lot of difficult cases. It is all going
to take a lot of time. In the meantime, in the natural course
of events, the portfolio of the Churches Conservation Trust is
going to steadily increase—that is natural—but what
they are faced with is a declining budget in real terms, and so
what has been said about the need for more resources for the Churches
Conservation Trust from the detached overview position of the
Advisory Board, we support that need for resources very strongly
indeed.
Mr Field: Can I make a comparison
between Jenny's portfolio and ours. If we take the Unitarian Chapel
in Wallasey, which Jenny's Trust has taken over, huge numbers
of activities are now going on there but it is a building with
a number of rooms and—and this is in no way detracting from
what the Trust has done—it is easier to put kitchens and
lavatories in than if you have got a great medieval building.
It is somewhat more difficult, which is what David was saying,
to adapt those buildings. It is not necessarily impossible, but
it is more difficult to do.
Dr Freeman: I would entirely agree
with your point, Frank, but also I would emphasise that HCT has
created new-build, as at Walpole Old Chapel in Suffolk where there
was no scope for a loo and a kitchen within the envelope of the
historic chapel—it would have been a travesty to do that—so
we built a little block outside which fulfils that purpose. We
have also done that kind of thing at the Dissenters' Chapel, where
we built new facilities behind one of the colonnades, which cannot
be seen but which has enabled that cemetery chapel to be regenerated.
Q42 Helen Southworth: One of the
things that I wanted to ask was similar to the question I asked
before about bringing new people into an understanding and an
enjoyment of the historic environment, people from socially disadvantaged
groups or people who were not normally accessing heritage. I was
wondering whether you thought there was a role within that for
churches and listed buildings.
Mr Baker: If I could put my DAC
hat on temporarily (and I am not here in that capacity), I think
one of the ways in which the wider community can get linked into
their churches, whether they use them or not, is by the creation
of "friends" organisations. This tends to happen rather
better in prosperous rural areas than in urban situations, but
if you have got the whole community in some form or other behind
the church, not just the parochial church council, this can be
a focus for social activities, for engagement, for understanding
about the building and, crucially, for fund-raising for maintenance.
Mr Truman: I think that is right.
You can hit a number of targets all at once with this. The Trust
now has an education programme which I think probably, to be fair,
came from trustees and from the DCMS wanting to see school projects
going into churches and learning about our heritage. What we are
seeing also as a result is that school children, having learnt
about a trust church in their midst—Vange in Essex, for
example, a church that was heavily vandalised—then take
ownership of it and start to care for it and be concerned for
it. In Vange the local school children have designed replacement
stained-glass windows that were smashed by perhaps their elder
brothers in former years. They are now actually keeping watch
on the church and there is a regular series of community events,
secular and worship events, going on there and the church has
come back to life as the result of an education visit aimed at
broadening the types of people involved. I think, yes, that is
the case. Our favourite example is St Paul's in Bristol, our circus
church, which is a stunning Georgian church in a Grade I listed
square. I do not know if any of you know St Paul's in Bristol
where the 1980's riots were, but it was an area which saw terrible
decline and disadvantage. With the help of £2.5 million from
HLF we have restored that church and there is now a circus school
in there as tenant, and they are bringing a completely new cross-section
of society into that building from across Bristol and it is working
wonders and it means that our church is being looked at after.
Dr Freeman: Could I just speak
for the virtues of disabled access which we have introduced to
professional standards. Nearly all our chapels have it, and we
do find that disabled access is used. We have one or two people
at Todmorden Unitarian Church, active members of our local group
there, who are quite seriously disabled and it has provided access
for them and they take part fully in the facilities and events
that the chapel offers.
Mr Field: On that, we are pleased
that the Department sets us targets for visitors, and we have
a million visitors a year plus and we actually fulfil that. There
is a danger, though, that the Department is so breaking down its
target and asking us to count who is going in and who is coming
out, that if you have got slender resources you are diverting
resources to that exercise rather than perhaps doing your mainstream,
and I do question whether the people coming in quite see themselves
in the categories that the Department thinks they should fit into.
I was at a project in the East End the other week, and it was
a Bangladeshi group, and I wanted politically to talk to them
about identity. I said to them, "Look, I have two identities.
I am English and I am an Anglican. What is your identity?"
They all surprised me. They said that they were British and, secondly,
Bangladeshi. If they were coming through our churches, presumably
we would do this as an ethnic minority. It was quite interesting
that none of that group thought of themselves primarily in those
terms, but the Department has a structure that we should be meeting
those sorts of sub-totals of our total, and I am not so sure how
valuable that is.
Q43 Helen Southworth: I hear what
you say about that, but, leaving aside the specifics of the categorisation,
do you think, in your experience, non traditional access to heritage
happens by itself or do you need to work at it?
Mr Field: Both, I think.
Q44 Helen Southworth: To give you
an example, did the community ask for them?
Dr Freeman: I would say that the
publicity at HCT plays a very big role. We generate an enormous
amount of publicity, press releases, booklets, guidebooks and
all the rest from Head Office but also locally as well, where
local committees will advertise events very widely in a local
area and pull in audiences. We think our audiences come from up
to 20 miles—that is the limit—but most will come from
closer.
Mr Baker: As far as the Advisory
Board is concerned, this is not strictly part of our remit, but,
in addition to advising on the heritage merits of potentially
redundant churches, we also advise on the extent to which they
are capable of accepting change, and we do this in a fair up-front
way, providing papers that indicate that a certain amount of change
is possible and make sure this gets to the locals and gets into
the local system, and so when a church that is going for alternative
use is offered on the market there is the sort of paper work there
that gives an indication of what the opportunities might be. The
sorts of thing you are talking about could be one of those, but
obviously the users have got to come to the opportunity.
Mr Field: On that, Helen, I think
that there is a huge group out there who are deeply sympathetic
to church buildings, and we see that with the numbers of people
who visit. Whilst in no way do we want to detract from your inquiry
about what the sum of public support should be, I think there
is an onus on us to try and see how we might tap better the huge
resource of goodwill out there from people who do actually love
visiting churches and feel that churches are part, not just of
their own local communities but a crucial part of understanding
what England is about.
Q45 Mr Evans: Can I press you on
that one, Frank, because I go to a church in Ribchester, which
you may know as an old Roman town, and it seems that we are forever
raising funds to keep that church in good nick. We have just done
an appeal on arts and heritage where the congregation all subscribe
money over a four-year period for that church in Stibb, which
is another church which is not too far away and which is a very
historic church. Yet, we are limited in numbers and because of
the sort of money that we are talking about to keep these churches
in good nick it is very difficult and, if we were not doing it
over four years, I am not too sure how we would do it, and we
do a number of fund-raising activities as well as getting money
from the congregation. Do people really appreciate the scale of
the problem? We are looking here at £1.2 billion worth of
repairs that are now outstanding on churches. I do not know if
my church is in that figure, but how can you access cash outside
of congregations to make sure that these fantastic churches and
buildings that are there are going to exist in 100 years time?
Mr Field: There is a case for
greater public support (ie greater taxpayer support), but I believe
that we should try and do that in a way which enhances local support
rather than people feel that somebody else is taking over the
responsibility. A form of matching funding would actually achieve
that. I think there have been too many areas of British life where
people sign off and think, "Oh, that is the taxpayer's responsibility.
We do not have to do anything more." The size of the bill
is so huge, as you say, that volunteers by themselves are not
actually going to be able to achieve that, though they achieve
miracles. What we want is a form of increased taxpayer support
which encourages people to try even harder to raise funds.
Mr Baker: This can be done quite
usefully with a mix of national and local government support.
When I worked for a county council as their conservation and archaeology
officer and we had a grants budget, before it was cut altogether,
for historic buildings, we quite deliberately offered grants to
those historic churches that did not fall within the grants that
English Heritage were then giving. So we were trying to do that
sort of partnership as well, of course, as encouraging the locals
at the same time, but I think very few local authorities now have
historic buildings grants budgets left.
Mr Truman: If you look at the
Church of England report Building Faith in our Future,
which is their strategy for church buildings, one of the things
they call for is an equal place at the table with other sources
of government funding at regional and national level—ODPM
monies and RDA money and regeneration monies. I think there is
a perception that churches are seen as faith groups which are
outside the mainstream of funding. We have a church in Cambridgeshire
which is right next to one of the ODPM Growth Area developments,
literally in the next field. We tried to get some money from the
Community Facilities Funding that goes alongside Growth Areas
to use that medieval building—it was an empty medieval building—as
part of the plan for community facilities, and it was just missing
off the radar of all of bodies—the local authority in the
region and the Cambridgeshire Horizons implementation body that
had been set up. They were just perplexed at the idea that this
building could have something to contribute. I think overcoming
some of those barriers would be of greater help on this issue.
Mr Field: May I add one point
to what Crispin said about the launching of that Church of England
report which was done in Lambeth Palace. Gathered together were
civic society—the people and organisations who have through
the decades and centuries supported these great buildings—and
the Government minister who was kindly responding to the launch
of this building, at the end, invited the assembled company to
join civil society. She had not realised that civil society was
there and was operating without her coming or going or anything
else. I think it is immensely important when you are doing your
report that you seek ways in which you strengthen civil society
rather than civil society thinking it is another reason for the
state either elbowing us out or the state does not see us having
any role at all in maintaining our historical heritage.
Q46 Chairman: You are optimistic
that there is still a willingness on the part of the community
at large to join together to try and save historic buildings?
I went to the launch of an appeal for my local church and there
were half a dozen people and they were the same people I see at
every voluntary organisational event, no matter what it is—WRVS,
Red Cross—and predominantly elderly people, and not particularly
affluent either. You are optimistic that somehow there is this
untapped resource there.
Mr Field: No, I wish to salute
the efforts which are made. In Nigel's example it was interesting
what he did not say. He was saying how huge it was, how continuous
this activity was, but they do it. What we are looking for is
some form of partnership with tax-payers through the state which
encourages that rather than makes people feel that their role
is now irrelevant to the raising of funds. I think we are at the
stage where the bills are mounting, and, unless there is a response
centrally, people will just feel that they are drowning in this
situation. It is getting that combination right which I think
is crucial.
Dr Freeman: I think I can add
to that by saying that any relief on charitable giving to church
buildings and charities in general will, of course, be very welcome.
Historic Chapels Trust funding works slightly differently. We
have found historically over 13 years that we have obtained roughly
a third of our funding from English Heritage, roughly a third
from the Heritage Lottery Fund since it started and we have raised
about a third ourselves; we have raised funds all over the place
from a variety of donors, nobody giving us money of any great
magnitude and most people giving money on a one-off basis. We
do have a subscribers system, but these are people who have come
in for £10 a year and sometimes give us more. Somehow or
other we have scrambled all this money together to over £4.5
million which has all been directed to our chapels, but I think
that at HCT we do have concerns about the future funding of English
Heritage and the future funding available from HLF. If that declines,
we will be worrying and in trouble. I think a lot of private people
give us money because we are getting grants from EH and HLF and
have their backing—that is important—a sort of imprimatur
that what we are doing is the right thing.
Q47 Alan Keen: Recently particularly
we have all looked at the rivalry between Islam and Christianity,
but I can tell you, it is nothing compared to when I was a boy
and the rivalry between even different branches of the Methodist
Chapel and the other denominations. We used to throw bricks at
them, and this was part of life. Thank goodness that has all finished.
Not the last people who approached me in my constituency but the
one before that was an American Evangelist church, who has partly
rebuilt a series of factory units to make a church, but the people
who approach me more often than any other type are Muslims, and
there seem to be as many branches of Islam, or certainly groups
of Muslims, as there were when I was a boy and was astonished
by the rivalry between local churches. Is there a bar in the Church
of England against churches being used by other religions? It
is the same God when we are looking at Islam, for instance. Is
there a bar?
Mr Field: Whilst our churches
have been made redundant they are still consecrated buildings.
There is no bar on community groups using them for community activities,
but there are still occasional services which are carried out
in our churches, and we actually encourage that, but we have never
had an application from a Muslim group specifically to use one
of our buildings for religious purpose, though—it comes
back to this accounting business—we would not know whether
Muslim groups as community groups, as part of community groups,
would naturally participate.
Mr Truman: All Souls Bolton is
a huge Victorian church in our care in the middle of an area which
is now 95% Asian, and the Asian community are at the forefront
of saving that building, but they want it as a community centre
for the whole community. They have said to us that they do not
want it for worship and they do not want to be exclusive about
it, but they are fascinated by it because it is in the centre
of their community but also because it is a religious building,
albeit it is a different religion, and we see a great future for
that building being run by the local Asian community. We have
a building in Toxteth which is going to be a multi-faith centre.
That will stop short of non-Christian worship because of the sensibilities
of the Church of England, but it will in every other respect celebrate
different faiths and, being on the front line of the Toxteth riots,
it is very appropriate.
Mr Baker: I think I can give a
slightly wider picture to that. Only about 10% of redundancies
end up in the Trust whereas nearly 75% end up in alternative uses
of some sort or other. Amongst those alternative uses are, indeed,
religious uses. Yes, as Frank says, there are sensibilities about
how an ex-Anglican building is going to be used, but you do get
quite strong community-based uses of churches. There is quite
a lot that goes on in the 75% that end up in alternative uses.
Mr Field: In the Bolton example,
it was the Muslims who were beating off the white yobbos who were
trying to burn down the building in the sense that they felt that
this was a great building for the community. As you would expect,
there are war memorials in the church, and as I was going round
I was discussing with the Asian leadership that one of the things
we would obviously want to do is to move those into the sanctuary,
which would remain a religious area of the community building;
but many of the people who had come to live round that area themselves
had fought in those two wars or had relatives who had, and one
of the suggestions was that they might like to give the equivalent
memorial stones for people who now live around that area whose
own family members died in the first and second World Wars so
that there would in fact be two plaques, one remembering those
who died in the wars who actually lived in that area and a second
plaque of people who now live in the area who have families who
died in the same war on the same side over the last century. So
there is another side to this Muslim debate which is not always
picked up in the media.
Q48 Alan Keen: Coming back to theology
rather than buildings, there has been movement but there appears
to be no movement on the bar against other religions using Church
of England buildings for worship. Is that the case? There are
so many Muslim groups in my constituency who would love to have
anywhere. They are not looking for churches, they are looking
for any building of any sort where they can worship. Is there
a chance of that bar ever coming off? We are not now talking about
buildings, and maybe we should not get much into this, but we
are trying to preserve buildings and there are people who would
love to use them.
Mr Field: We have not had any
applications. In the Bolton example people have already got places
to worship in but actually want some significant community resources,
and it is the Asian community who are the spearhead in putting
forward proposals for that that we are trying to join up with.
Q49 Helen Southworth: Could I ask
very briefly about the craft skills involved in the work? Some
of the examples of the churches show an incredibly high level
of original craftsmanship. What is your experience of getting
access to the right kinds of craftsmen? Is this something that
the Government needs to support?
Dr Freeman: Yes. I feel very strongly
on this point. I am qualified in building conservation myself
and I often take a direct role in employing craftsmen at our chapels.
There are not enough of them and it all adds to the time frame
during which a project can be carried out, because the craftsman
cannot come when you would most like him on the spot. When one
is repairing buildings of Grade I or II quality, one has to have
a well qualified person doing the work, and so I was pleased to
see that the HLF is now offering £7 million worth of bursaries,
but still it is not easy to make your way as a craftsman, particularly
when you are young. I think rates of pay are not necessarily very
high until you get well-known.
Mr Field: We put in our contract
asking people whether they offered New Deal and also Modern Apprentices.
You obviously cannot do that with tiny contracts but with the
larger ones. On the Bristol one that Crispin mentioned the builders
and the conservation company offered two modern apprenticeships,
and one of the guys turned out to be a star, and not the one you
might have thought originally would have been, and is now an incredibly
valuable member of their staff.
Q50 Chairman: Can I return to the
central question of funding. Frank, you said that we need to look
beyond central government and encourage perhaps match funding.
Nevertheless, your grant, as you pointed out, has essentially
been frozen for the last few years, HCT gets money from English
Heritage, whose grant has also been declining in real terms, and
HLF which is under pressure. How serious is the funding position
facing your two organisations?
Mr Field: Supposing the responsibilities
of the Trust grew in the next 30 years as it has in the past 30
years and our budget remained stable in money terms, therefore
a cut in real terms, we would go under. Crispin has some examples
of churches where we already, with our cuts in budget, cannot
do the conservation work that we would like to be able to do.
Therefore they are falling into greater disrepair than we would
want them to be. Whilst we can happily say we can swim along in
the next few years, unless there is a major change in how the
Department views heritage within its budget and what it allocates
and therefore how we can continue to encourage volunteers to give,
in the way that Jenny describes, I think the longer term future
for the greatest collection of historic buildings in this country
is grim.
Dr Freeman: I would concur with
those remarks. I would also point out that at HCT we do tackle
chapels in the grossest of gross disrepair—some of them
are nearly derelict—because there has not been the kind
of quinquennial inspection system for those buildings which has
applied to Anglican churches for years and years. We face enormous
repair bills at some of our chapels and I think that if the EH
and HLF budget's are going to be cut back that is going to detract
enormously from the scope of work that HCT can complete within
a reasonable period of time. It is the unreasonable period of
time that creates yet more disrepair and the need for yet more
money.
Chairman: Thank you very much for coming
along this morning.
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