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SPEECH DURING DEBATE IN HOUSE OF LORDS ON CHURCH AND SOCIETY
19th MAY 2006
The Lord Bishop of Portsmouth: My Lords, 10 years ago during my first year in Portsmouth, I sat in the Guildhall listening to the Lord Mayor give his farewell speech on leaving office. He took as his theme the work of the voluntary sector in the city—probably one of the most densely populated areas of north Europe. He stated quite firmly that, without the voluntary sector, the community would collapse. Only a few years ago, our then Jewish Lord Mayor began her speech taking care to pay tribute in her opening paragraph to the work of the Churches in community building in our city. I found it quite telling that she considered it necessary and appropriate to say so. Portsmouth is a modern, secular city—a far cry from rural suburbia and rural Christendom. I want in what follows to speak about Portsmouth and the surrounding area and then briefly to move north of the border to speak a little about the Church of Scotland. Finally, I will pose one or two questions about government strategy and policy.
According to Home Office figures—accurate ones, this time; churchgoers are far more likely to get involved in community work than anyone else. This year marks the 30th anniversary of the founding of the Hampshire Voluntary Care Groups' Advisory Service, run by the Church of England dioceses of Portsmouth and Winchester. It has been described as one of our better-kept secrets. A simple and useful organisation, it supports 105 care groups, also known as good neighbourhood schemes, in Hampshire, which involve such activities as driving people to hospital and GP appointments, and picking up shopping or prescriptions. Last year, 3,500 volunteers undertook 99,000 tasks. That helps to keep people in their own homes for longer, serves to unlock hospital beds, reduces health inequalities and assists in areas where GP surgeries have closed. It is funded largely by Hampshire Adult Services and local PCTs, which are reducing their grants rapidly. It costs funders just 76p per task to keep the Advisory Service going, which in turn helps the groups to survive and sets up new ones with two highly effective advisory staff. It would be hard to see any other provider get someone to and from hospital with such a personal service for less than £1.
I could mention many other initiatives, such as St John's, Ryde, on the Isle of Wight, which has a community initiative at Preston Close, or the way in which St Cuthbert's Copnor in Portsmouth is working towards a £3.4 million rebuilding project—it is £375,000 short at the moment—to release an old hall for sheltered housing for Portsmouth Housing Association. A new GP surgery is now housed within the main part of the church building. Perhaps also worthy of note is the work of the Portsmouth area refugee support, which subsists on lottery funding, receiving none from statutory sources. Although a secular charity, without all the Churches' involvement in providing volunteers, running the committee, fundraising and securing food for the destitute and hungry—and I speak for all the Churches here, not just the Church of England—it would not have survived.
Turning north, there is the impressive track record of the Church of Scotland CrossReach, which covers no less than 40 per cent of the voluntary work in the entire northern kingdom, covering everything from homelessness, addiction, mental health and the elderly. I am told that CrossReach—I grew up within its boundaries in another Church, the Anglican sister Church, and we learnt from it—has 2,000 employees and 2,000 volunteers. Its mission statement is a paradigm of Scots logical precision:
"In Christ's name we seek to retain and regain the highest quality of life which each individual is capable of experiencing at any given time".
That more than adequately expresses the motivation behind the work of the many residential and day care units throughout Scotland. Like so much Church-based social work, it is a child of the 19th century. Set up in 1869, it has moved with the times and is another well kept secret.
On government policy and strategy, we have reached the stage where we need to know what each other wants to do and what each other wants in the relationship; we need to know how the partnerships that the Churches and other faith groups are fostering in our communities can continue to intermesh with government initiatives, and how they cannot. One of the problems that Churches have in dealing with government is uncertainty. It would be good, for example, to have some clarity as soon as possible about the direction that the Government will be taking regarding City Regions. We look forward to the White Paper, which we are led to believe is imminent, and we hope that its publication will not be delayed by the recent changes in the composition of the Cabinet.
Eight core cities have been identified: Birmingham, Bristol, Leeds, Liverpool, Manchester, Newcastle, Nottingham and Sheffield. Perhaps the Bishop of Portsmouth might be permitted to add that it is a pity the list does not consist of nine! I am aware of talk about Primary Urban Areas, including the Portsmouth/Havant/Fareham/Gosport conurbation, which makes a lot of sense. The major question concerns what kind of local government is being envisaged. The uncertainty surrounding these matters inevitably impinges on voluntary organisations and the Churches, and not just on funding.
We instinctively regard ourselves as rooted in our local communities, surviving with remarkable steadfastness the vagaries of the next reorganisation. We very often provide that indefinable but very real quality of stabilitas—a good Benedictine principle that is appropriately invoked on St Dunstan's day. He was a late 10th-century predecessor of the most reverend Primate the Archbishop of Canterbury—a reformer, like him. Stabilitas really brings across the message that, with all these changes, we can easily be ignored. How committed are the Government in taking us seriously when decisions are taken? How can our membership be helped even further, perhaps by funding an initiative to look at how the Churches could better engage with the public service delivery agenda? I sometimes get a sense of hearing well intentioned government rhetoric in one ear, while in the other ear hearing of congregations that with better resources might achieve far more in the voluntary sector than they already do. Although we have managed—I speak for my own patch—to secure faith representation on all eight of the Local Strategic Partnerships in the area, one still hears of other local authorities who tend to follow the secularist agenda, perhaps thinly veiled by an apparent desire for fairness, caricatured in these words, "Let's keep the Established Church out because it would not be politically correct", when in practice it is really about ignoring all the faith communities.
I am aware that there are some rather inward-looking congregations here and there that do not always grasp the opportunities that are handed to them on a plate. Nevertheless, there is an issue of justice in a world where, whether we like it or not, religion is back on the agenda and is brushed aside to our common detriment. I am not thumping a tub for faith groups to take over everything; we could not and we should not. I am asking only for fair recognition of what we do.
The other question to which I want to draw attention was touched on by the most reverend Primate the Archbishop of Canterbury towards the end of his speech. I refer to English Heritage's recent initiative, Inspired! It is all very well to celebrate the good work that we do—I would not want this debate to be misunderstood as a kind of religious mutual admiration society—but, as the Government move social work more and more into the voluntary and community sectors, they put the Churches more and more into a position of picking up some of what was directly initiated by statutory services some time ago, instead of what we used to do, which was to look for where government and others had not yet been and to be a bit of a pioneer. That is a bit of a shift, which we are adjusting to.
We need our buildings, but perhaps not all the ones that we have at the moment. The time is soon coming when our congregations will no longer be able to foot increasingly expensive repair bills. I know that the VAT issue, which has long been a bit of a sore, is being looked at, but it has taken the Chancellor a bit of time to heed the wake-up call. As in so many other areas in the debate, we are—I speak for all the Churches, echoing some of the concerns of the noble Lord, Lord Roberts—pleased that in the past two years we have been able to claim 100 per cent off VAT on church repairs, and in the recent Budget that has been extended to the often considerable VAT on architect and other professional fees. (As the son of an architect, I feel a bit torn about that one!) All this needs to go much further. The proposals recently put forward by English Heritage for churches and synagogues asked for £8 million per annum over three years for a maintenance grant scheme and for training grants and other things. All that is about the survival and adaptation of what are sometimes called "plant" in incarnating our faith communities in neighbourhoods up and down the land.
To extend some of the words of the most reverend Primate the Archbishop of Canterbury, prayer and costly witness need a specific local base to have a context. The fact is that 86 per cent of the population visited a church last year, and 40 per cent of the population attended carol services last Christmas. It is also the fact that 48 per cent of the population in London attended carol services last Christmas; what, says a supporter of Pompey, is special about London? Those are rather higher figures than those given for participation in the recent Local Elections. All those facts and considerations speak for themselves, and perhaps the message of this debate is that our well kept secrets need to be not only recognised, but nurtured by all the so-called stakeholders.
Finally and briefly—and this is not just for the ears of the noble Lord, Lord Patten—I should explain that, if I am not in my place during the lunch hour, it will not be because of a Portsmouth/Liverpool allergy, looking forward to the words of my colleague the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Liverpool, nor will it simply be because of the call of my stomach. Lunch hour here in the House of Lords is the only time this early summer that the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Birmingham and I could meet—elsewhere in the building—with our respective National Education Officers. I assure your Lordships of the importance that he and I set by our ecumenical co-operation, which is anything but arms limitation talks.!
+ Kenneth Portsmouth
