House of Commons - Culture, Media and Sport

Select Committee on Culture, Media and Sport Third Report

4 Places of worship

183. There are at least 14,000 listed places of worship in England, 12,200 of which are Anglican churches with the remainder being mostly Roman Catholic churches or non-conformist churches and chapels.[360] Anglican churches alone form 45% of Grade I listed buildings in England.[361] Most cathedrals and many churches are the oldest buildings in continuous use in their environments, and in many cases they stand as the focus of conservation areas. The Church Heritage Forum made no exaggeration when it stated in evidence that it was impossible to consider the heritage of the country without recognising the contribution of church buildings.[362]

184. Church buildings have a value not just as a heritage landmark and architectural example but also as a base for the community, sometimes being the only local space of any size with public access. Cathedrals host concerts, lectures, degree ceremonies and other ceremonial events;[363] parish churches host local events, although more often it is associated buildings which provide the venue for community activities, such as youth and children's groups, out-of-school classes, social clubs and counselling.[364]

185. Church buildings belonging to certain denominations enjoy an exemption from listed building and conservation controls applicable to all other buildings - the Ecclesiastical Exemption. In the Church of England, responsibility for maintaining buildings rests with the parochial council, which seeks permission from the diocese for work to churches through the faculty system. The Inspection of Churches Measure 1955 requires an inspection of each church every five years. DCMS recently conducted a review of whether or not the Exemption ought to be retained, and it concluded that in principle it should.[365]

186. As one witness pointed out, the Church of England is widely regarded as being immensely rich;[366] but it was put to us that much of the income from the Church of England endowment was absorbed by clergy pensions and that many dioceses were in fact in some financial difficulty. The total spent by parishes on major repairs to churches in 2003 was £101 million, although a further £373 million worth of major works was deemed necessary and awaiting funding.[367] English Heritage have since advanced a figure of £925 million as the cost of major repairs needed over the next five years, and it observes that although the annual cost (£185 million) might be shrunk, it is not a backlog which can be eliminated once and for all.[368] The bulk of the cost of repairs is met by a blend of public funding (approximately 30%) and contributions from congregationers (approximately 65%); one assessment placed the average congregation's fundraising effort at about £5,000 per year.[369] Public funds include English Heritage grants, Heritage Lottery Fund grants, VAT relief (under the Listed Places of Worship scheme, described above at paragraph 176) and payments from landfill tax receipts.

187. The scale of the repair task across the Church estate is huge and the impact on individual parishes rather irregular. An analysis of spending on repairs in 2001 found that 42% of parishes spent nothing on repairs that year and a further 33% spent less than £5,000. Only 2% spent more than £50,000. If such a pattern is truly representative, a parish might expect to spend less than £5,000 most years but face bills of £50,000 or more once every fifty years. The occasional nature of very expensive events poses problems for financial planning.[370] The Association of English Cathedrals noted that the combination of higher conservation standards and health and safety legislation had made it substantially more expensive to maintain all heritage buildings and that cathedrals were no exception.[371]

188. English Heritage grants for the upkeep of churches are made through the Repair grants for Places of Worship Scheme run jointly with the Heritage Lottery Fund. A breakdown of contributions by each of the two bodies since the inception of the scheme in 1996-97[372] showed considerable fluctuation from year to year but with totals of £20 million to £25 million normally being offered.[373]

189. English Heritage recently launched a major programme - Inspired! - to raise awareness of the challenges facing places of worship in maintaining their buildings in good condition. Among the various solutions proposed in the programme are a new small grants scheme to supplement the main Repair Grants scheme, and a maintenance grant scheme to encourage regular maintenance work in an attempt to prevent major repairs becoming necessary.[374] We note that at least one diocese (St Edmundsbury) is operating a central maintenance service.[375]

190. Cathedrals are financially almost totally independent of the Church Commissioners, and responsibility for upkeep of the fabric rests with individual Cathedral chapters. Any changes to the fabric have to comply with the planning regime established under the Care of Cathedrals Measure 1990. A further Measure in 1999 requires cathedral authorities each to employ an architect or fabric surveyor and stipulates that a survey of the fabric should be undertaken every five years.

191. Church of England cathedrals presently spend approximately £11 million per annum on repairs and maintenance, although a recent estimate by English Heritage found that £39 million of urgent work was outstanding.[376] We saw at first hand at Lincoln Cathedral the scale of a £2 million project to restore the Dean's Eye rose window, widely acknowledged as one of the greatest in existence. This was only one element of a repair programme due to last until 2020 and costing £1 million per annum at today's prices.[377] Similar or even greater challenges are faced by other cathedrals, including York Minster.[378] Yet, despite the constant level of need, grant funding is becoming harder to obtain. English Heritage provided £3 million per annum under the Cathedrals Grant Scheme in 1991 but now offers only £1 million. We heard that as a result of difficulty in securing grant aid, some cathedrals had had to neglect essential fabric repair programmes or only tackle small parts of schemes, with the result that the need for work become ever more acute. Phasing work is an expensive way of doing things, as the Cathedral Architects Association demonstrated with reference to Carlisle Cathedral.[379]

192. Cathedrals in particular have sought to recoup part of their maintenance costs through charging for entry. At Lincoln Cathedral, the decision to charge (£4) had been taken reluctantly and the immediate response had been a dip in visitor numbers, but these had since recovered. The charging policy was generating some £250,000 more per annum than had been received through voluntary donations, which had generally averaged between 50 and 75 pence when applied at York Minster.[380] We were told that the receipts from entry charges were applied just to offset the costs of visitor services and maintenance costs arising directly from wear and tear due to visitor traffic.[381] Lincoln Cathedral had also agreed to allow the building to be used as a location for filming The Da Vinci Code and told us that the benefits had not just been financial: regional awareness of the building had increased and so had local pride.

193. The Church Heritage Forum spoke up strongly for the role of churches as a focus for the whole of the community (not just congregations) and drew our attention to its recent report Building Faith in our Future, which set out that case in detail.[382] It noted that buildings were increasingly becoming fit for community use, with a trend towards the installation of new toilets and heating.[383] The Government recognised in the Rural White Paper the value of church buildings as a community resource and as the last remaining public building in many rural communities;[384] but there is a question mark about how far that community resource is being supported by community funding. For instance, it was suggested by Mr Trevor Cooper, Chairman of Council of the Ecclesiological Society, that parish councils rarely gave grants to church buildings even though they were empowered to do so,[385] although it was unclear whether this was due to what one witness described as "a fear of religion"[386] or a lack of effort by churches to make applications. Mr Cooper also pointed out that Defra appeared to have overlooked, in its review of parish governance, the part which parishes could play in supporting church buildings.[387]

194. Church buildings may need to be adapted if they are to be fit for community use. Some striking and radical examples were given by Mr Cooper in his book How do we keep our parish churches?, which he supplied to the Committee.[388] The Church Heritage Forum also drew our attention to examples of churches or church buildings being used as cafés, post offices or "cyber centres".[389] More often the changes will entail the addition of heating, cooking and toilet facilities. Witnesses for the Church Heritage Forum were generally satisfied that English Heritage achieved a suitable balance between preserving church fabric and enabling adaptation for community use, and they described English Heritage as having been "very positive and supportive".[390] Other evidence was put to us however suggesting that English Heritage and amenity societies were sometimes inflexible in their approach to alterations and gave too much weight to conservation rather than adaptive re-use. The Archdeacon of Suffolk cited two examples, one where proposals by the parish for modern facilities such as lavatories and kitchens had been consistently rejected, and another where a proposal to widen a doorway to allow wheelchair access to a lavatory was being opposed even though parishioners saw no alternative means of access.[391] We raised these examples with the Church Heritage Forum; they replied that they were aware of occasional difficulties in reaching agreement with amenity societies but that early consultation was usually fruitful.[392]

195. The Forum identified "major potential" for churches to contribute to tourism and it called for "a greater sense of recognition and partnership" to assist those in the Church engaged in developing church tourism activities.[393] The Association of English Cathedrals expressed frustration at what it saw as a lack of effort by DCMS officials responsible for tourism policy in maintaining contact with organisations representing cathedrals despite their significance as tourist attractions.[394]

196. The separation of Church and state is long established in the UK, and responsibility for maintenance of the Church estate rests squarely with the Church Commissioners, albeit supplemented by grant funding from English Heritage. As the Bishop of London noted in a widely quoted remark in September 2003, the Church of England is in financial terms the most disestablished church in Western Europe.[395] The Ecclesiastical Exemption reiterates the separation, acknowledging the exemption from secular listed building controls for churches in ecclesiastical use, on the understanding that denominations will maintain their own systems of control and protection. One witness believed that separation went so far as to amount to DCMS "ignoring cathedrals and churches in discharging its responsibilities" and following "a secular agenda";[396] and witnesses from the Church Heritage Forum claimed that DCMS had "on a number of occasions and in lots of different ways failed to recognise the existence of not only cathedrals but of churches … as places of architectural heritage and as places of community interaction".[397]

197. It was suggested to us that the value of churches in furthering the aims of central Government with regard to community cohesion should be reflected in a willingness by the Government to contribute substantially to the upkeep of the buildings themselves.[398] Certainly, other Western European countries have taken a different approach: in France all church buildings older than 1904 are fully financed by the state; and the level of state support for church buildings in both Germany and Scandinavia is substantial.[399] Witnesses representing the Church Heritage Forum did not advocate such a regime for the UK, suggesting that in churches in both France and Finland there was a sense that churches were not being cared for and were "dead" because of the transfer of responsibility from the local populace to the state.[400] The solution preferred by the Church Heritage Forum would be what it saw as a partnership approach - for DCMS to provide through English Heritage funding to meet half of the cost of urgent building repairs, in addition to a favourable regime for VAT on repairs.[401]

198. The major obstacle to be overcome by denominations making the case for more public funding is the perception by the public that churches are - as Mr Cooper said - "rather like a public utility, free at the point of service, paid for by mysterious means, just there".[402] Public awareness of how the costs of maintaining church buildings are met is low, as English Heritage point out on their web pages devoted to the Inspired! campaign.[403] We believe that state support for all places of worship through general taxation would not be readily understood by the public and would at present be inappropriate.

199. Faith groups have responsibilities: they should be approaching parish councils for support and showing imagination in how buildings could be used. We recommend that each denomination should fund small local teams to visit each place of worship perhaps once a year in order to carry out basic survey and maintenance services; individual dioceses might fund such teams for Church of England buildings. There will always, however, be a need for major repairs. Existing funding through English Heritage is quite inadequate, and the phasing of repairs which results is driving up their cost significantly. If dioceses are prepared to commit to providing basic maintenance services, then we recommend that in return English Heritage should be resourced to provide a level of grant funding for major repairs to both cathedrals and other places of worship equivalent in real terms to that provided until only five or ten years ago. If repair projects can be completed more quickly, more efficient use will be made of public funds.

Redundant places of worship

200. Declining congregations can lead to hard decisions about whether or not the cost of maintaining a building is too great a burden for parishioners. From time to time churches are declared redundant and no longer needed for worship; in the case of Church of England buildings, the Church Commissioners then have a responsibility to settle the future of the building. 1626 Anglican churches were declared redundant between 1969 and 2002.[404] The future trend in redundancy, at least for Church of England buildings, is uncertain, although one witness has predicted an acceleration from the present 30 per year.[405] The Churches Conservation Trust pointed out that many teeter on the brink, with small and ageing congregations supporting growing repair bills.[406] Dr Freeman, Director of the Historic Chapels Trust, told us that about ten listed buildings used for worship by Methodists were becoming redundant each year and that the Roman Catholic Church was planning large-scale declarations of redundancy in the north-west.[407]

201. Once a church has been declared redundant, the Church Commissioners have three options. One option is to find an alternative use, perhaps with a measure of acceptable internal or external change; a second option, where the church is of outstanding value but does not lend itself to re-use, is for it to be vested in the Churches Conservation Trust and maintained jointly by the Church Commissioners and public funds; and the third option, followed when neither of the other two are appropriate, is demolition. 113 cases were considered by the Commissioners between 2000 and 2004: alternative uses were found for 72%, 11% were vested in the Trust, and 17% were demolished.[408]

202. Until now, the Church Commissioners have been advised on which course to follow by an Advisory Board for Redundant Churches, formed of independent members appointed by the Archbishops after consultation with the Prime Minister. Synod has however approved abolition of the Advisory Board and the establishment of a Special Advisory Committee within the Council for the Care of Churches. We are aware of arguments against abolition, and we note in particular the tension between re-use, which can reduce integrity in purely heritage terms but which can generate receipts for the Church Commissioners, and vesting in the Churches Conservation Trust, which will preserve the fabric but remain a drain on Church resources. We did not explore arguments for or against the Board's abolition in detail, and we therefore we make no comment here.

203. The Churches Conservation Trust, which maintains redundant churches of outstanding heritage value but for which there was no prospect of alternative use at the time of vesting, currently has a portfolio of 335 Grade 1 or Grade II* listed buildings. This portfolio is expanding by two or three churches each year. It receives grant-in-aid from DCMS of just over £3 million per annum: this is complemented by a grant of just over £1 million from the Church Commissioners. Further funds generated partly by the Trust itself and partly through HLF and other grant funding bring its total annual budget to approximately £5 million.[409]

204. The Trust has achieved a great deal since its establishment in 1968, particularly in bringing major urban churches back into community use (often with the aid of the Heritage Lottery Fund). Its costs however do not diminish, although its funding settlement has been frozen since 2001 and is therefore decreasing in real terms.[410] Indeed, pressure on funds is more likely to increase as the portfolio grows, and the Trust's Chairman, the Rt Hon Frank Field MP, warned that if current trends were sustained, the Trust would "go under" and that the longer term future for "the greatest collection of historic buildings in the country" was "grim".[411] The Church Commissioners have therefore made "strenuous efforts … to contain and control the flow of new vestings".[412] The Trust told us that it had worked "energetically" to develop new revenue sources and it envisages an increase in such funds of 20% over the next three years, but it believes that a strategic rethink and a sustainable long-term funding formula is needed. In practice this means an increase in grant-in-aid, and this is the solution favoured by the Trust, the Church Commissioners and others.[413] It suggested that any increase might be tied specifically to projects which aid wider regeneration and community development goals of the Government.[414]

205. We also heard from the Historic Chapels Trust, formed in 1993, which takes into ownership redundant chapels, mostly Nonconformist, of Grade I or Grade II* quality. It has a far smaller portfolio than does the Churches Conservation Trust, numbering only 17 chapels. Unlike the Churches Conservation Trust, it receives no grant-in-aid but has relied upon grants from English Heritage and the Heritage Lottery Fund to complement its own fundraising activities. From the outset the Trust aimed to continue to use chapels for community activities such as concerts and exhibitions, and its chapels have usually generated enough money from events and donations to cover basic maintenance costs and improvements. Local involvement would appear to be an essential element of success: when the Trust acquires a chapel, it calls a public meeting to discuss plans and to form a group of volunteers to organise events.[415]

206. We commend the Historic Chapels Trust for its vigour in raising funds and its success in sustaining itself. It cannot, however, serve as a direct comparison with the Churches Conservation Trust, which has far more properties to maintain and has no control over the rate at which its portfolio increases. The Churches Conservation Trust is being asked to achieve too much with limited funds. Its grant should be increased substantially, although we see benefit in any increase being linked to proven community gain or generation of match funding.

360 Ev 104 Back

361 Ev 81 Back

362 Ev 81 Back

363 See Ev 30 Back

364 See Church Heritage Forum Ev 82 Back

365 The Ecclesiastical Exemption: The Way Forward, DCMS July 2005 Back

366 Ev 105 Back

367 Ev 85 Back

368 http://www.english-heritage.org.uk/inspired/server/show/nav.9560 Back

369 Ev 105 Back

370 Ev 105 Back

372 Initially known as the Joint Places of Worship Scheme Back