CHURCHES across the UK are engaged far more visibly in responding to poverty than they were two decades ago. Foodbanks, debt-advice centres, warm spaces, and community cafés are now common in church life. Congregations play a far more visible part now than in the early 2000s in supporting people facing hardship.
Yet, over the same period, progress on reducing poverty has flatlined: rates remain at about 20-22 per cent. But beneath that stability the experience of poverty has deepened: nearly half of those affected now live in very deep poverty (households with incomes below 40 per cent of median income). As members of the Joseph Rowntree Foundation’s Grassroots Poverty Action Group put it, “Nothing’s changed? Everything’s changed. It’s worse.”
Alongside the Church’s activity, this presents a sobering tension. The question cannot simply be whether the Church is doing enough, but whether it is responding to the right conditions — and to the way in which poverty itself has changed.
For much of the late 20th century, everyday life was shaped by a dense network of local institutions: banks, post offices, libraries, advice centres, churches, social clubs, and civic groups. While uneven, these formed a local neighbourhood infrastructure that increased the chances that people remained visible and that hardships surfaced earlier.
During recent decades, that landscape has thinned. Local-government funding fell sharply after 2010, especially in disadvantaged places. Local civil-society infrastructure has declined since the mid-2000s, and poorer neighbourhoods tend to have fewer voluntary organisations per resident — often about half the density of more affluent areas. Where they exist, they are more likely to close and less likely to be replaced.
Poverty now settles in places where infrastructure is more fragile: hardship is more likely to be borne in private, and support arrives later. Churches have often recognised that poverty is not only material, but relational: lived in shame, isolation, and exclusion from ordinary life. This moral understanding remains important, but it does not fully grasp poverty’s systemic character, particularly where austerity and institutional weakening have made hardship more difficult to see and slower to address.
THE difficulty is that, once poverty is understood primarily through a relational lens, it can shift how the problem is seen. Responsibility can come to rest more at the level of community, while wider drivers of hardship recede from view. It can begin to sound as though the problem were mainly about broken relationships, when it also concerns wages, housing, insecure work, debt, welfare design, service retrenchment, and the thinning of institutions that once held this together.
What has weakened is not only provision, but the conditions by means of which people remain visible and have access to support before they reach a crisis. In this context, local church presence begins to matter differently — not simply as a pastoral extra, or as a response at the point of crisis, but as part of the infrastructure that enables hardship to be noticed earlier, support to be held together, and recovery to become possible.
If poverty is shaped by weakened local infrastructure, the question becomes what part the Church plays in that landscape. There are about 38,500 churches across the UK, most involved in local social action and generating significant social and community value, through the provision of space, relationships, and local support. This points to scale and a church presence embedded in neighbourhood life, and yet that presence is not as straightforward as it can appear.
The challenge is not only whether local church assets remain, but whether they can be meaningfully used and sustained. Earlier work has suggested that church space and assets are often significantly under-used — but that question now sits within a more demanding context.
Churches expanded their social action during and after the pandemic, but post-pandemic disruption, rising costs, and uneven capacity have compounded the challenge of sustaining that activity. Earlier research has also suggested that clergy availability tends to be lower in more deprived areas, and that churches are more vulnerable to closure in areas where the need is greatest. Recent pressures appear to have intensified these dynamics. In that context, the presence of church assets alone is no guarantee of a functioning local infrastructure.
THE question, then, is not simply whether the Church is present, but what kind of presence it is able to become. Churches are often embedded meaningfully in local life, but they are only lightly connected to the wider structures through which material conditions are shaped. Research by Demos, in 2019, found that only about 17 per cent of churches had formal partnerships with local authorities. If this is broadly right — and still indicative of the wider pattern — then much church presence may be relationally rich, but institutionally thin.
Recent government emphasis on civil-society partnership, reflected in the development of a Civil Society Covenant and the establishment of a new Civil Society Council, points to a renewed recognition that charities, faith groups, and local organisations matter. This recognition is important.
But partnership is not the same thing as institutional repair. If poverty now embeds itself in places where the connective tissue of neighbourhood life has weakened, then what is needed is not only closer collaboration, but stronger local infrastructures through which hardship is recognised earlier, and support becomes more navigable and durable.
That is where the Church’s question changes. The challenge is no longer simply how to run more projects, nor even how to build stronger relationships. The deeper question is whether the Church can inhabit place in ways that strengthen the conditions of recovery, and what it now means to be present within them.
That could mean fuller use of buildings — not simply as venues, but as stable civic settings. It could mean stronger ties with advice services, housing support, schools, councils, and health systems. It might mean resisting the temptation to mistake visibility for sufficiency, and recognising that, in a thinned society, staying put — in ways that are open, connected, and durable — is no small thing.
Forty years on from Faith in the City (Comment, 5 September 2025), which called the Church to stand more intentionally alongside communities facing urban deprivation, that calling remains. But it must now be lived in a different kind of landscape — one in which many of the local institutions that once held neighbourhood life together have grown thin.
Where the institutions that once structured common life have grown thin, presence itself may be one of the most important forms of social infrastructure remaining.
The task, then, is not simply to be there, but to become the kind of presence through which lives are noticed sooner, support is held together more coherently, and recovery becomes possible again.
Stephen Hunt is a senior consultant in inclusive economic development, with 15 years’ experience across the UK and internationally, and a trustee of Church Action on Poverty.