THE impermanence of the Listed Places of Worship Grant scheme causes “anxiety and uncertainty” among volunteers and disincentivises long-term projects, the Commons Culture, Media and Sport Committee said last week.
In a letter calling on the Government to make the scheme permanent, the committee’s chair, Dame Caroline Dinenage, the Conservative MP for Gosport, said that the cap of £25,000 which was recently imposed “doesn’t just impact works on major projects or cathedrals. Even standard maintenance works, such as roofing projects, could breach this cap” (News, 22 January).
The Committee is conducting an inquiry on protecting built heritage. The Revd Paula Griffiths, a retired priest in Saffron Walden who serves as a self-supporting minister in churches affected by the cap, told MPs: “If a church has to concentrate purely on fundraising and keeping the rain out, it cannot fulfil its wider purpose. It cannot work with its congregation; it cannot work with its community in the way it has the potential to do; so the condition of the church is vital.” While acknowledging the potential for multiple uses of church buildings, amid questions about monetisation, she said: “I want to stress the importance of the church just as a place where people can be quiet and reflect.”
“Much of the work that a rural church does — that kind of social, community work —is not going to gain money for itself. It is a significant burden.”
The development director of the Historic Religious Buildings Alliance, Becky Payne, said that many rural churches were thriving, but those that were isolated had a “big challenge”. One option was to become a festival church.
She described carrying out an evaluation of the lottery grants for places of worship scheme: “Half of my interviews ended up being counselling sessions, because there was not a team of people; it was just Mrs Jones crying into her coffee at midnight trying to fill in yet another form. A lot of them had been very successful in bringing people in and it had been very cathartic, because people did care about that building.” One in 20 churches had a congregation with fewer than six in the congregation, many in “quite deprived areas”.
She told the committee that since 2017, when the heritage lottery grants for places of worship finished, fewer churches had been taken off the Buildings at Risk register: 23 in 2024 compared with 117 in 2018. Under this scheme, Ms Griffiths, said, “You did not have to say that you were doing lots of other marvellous things for your community. It was accepted that by doing that you were preserving something very important for the community, for the present and for the future.”
The Church of England’s director for cathedral and church buildings, Emily Gee, emphasised the work under way on income generation, and the contribution made by church building support officers, whose appointment was thanks to grants from the £11 million Buildings for Mission project (News, 10 November 2023). English parish churches spent more than £1 billion per year on church buildings, mostly through giving, legacies, fund-raising and grants she said. The LPWG cap meant that some people were “in panic mode”, asking: “How am I going to do this when I have committed financially to the project?”
Damian Hinds asked about “the right balance between preserving the building and preserving what happens, and has always happened, in that building”. Worship was the “fundamental purpose” of churches, Ms Gee said, and reflected in their architecture. An “intangible heritage” was being protected.