THE subject of parishes in areas of deprivation and the Church Commissioners’ part in supporting them returned to the General Synod on Tuesday in a debate on Lowest Income Communities (LInC) funding.
Amid warnings about a funding crisis in the poorest communities, members voted in favour of an amended motion that called on the Commissioners and the Archbishops’ Council to review the formula and processes used to distribute the funding, set to total £133 million in the current triennium.
The debate also heard from senior leaders who rejected the figures produced by the national church institutions (NCIs) which set out the amount of LInC funding that had gone to the most deprived parishes.
On Wednesday, the Bishop of Blackburn, the Rt Revd Philip North, called on the NCIs to “withdraw their data, apologise, and reissue”.
The original motion from Chester diocesan synod expressed regret that 12 mainland dioceses had received no LInC funding, “despite containing 268 parishes that are among the 25 per cent most socially deprived”. It called for a review of the formula, but specified that the geographical unit used to assess need should be the parish, not the diocese.
Established in 2017, LInC funding supports dioceses in sustaining ministry in socio-economically deprived areas. It is currently allocated to 28 dioceses using a formula based on average income of diocesan residents, income deprivation, and population. Dioceses have reported that the funding supports at least 1700 parishes, “and that many of them would not have their current level of stipendiary clergy without that support” (News, 14 February 2025).
Moving the motion, the Revd Christopher Blunt (Chester), a rector in a Stockport parish that is among the one per cent most deprived in the country, described LInC funding as the “cornerstone of the Church of England’s commitment to the poor”. But he drew attention to a “blind spot”: the fact that ineligible dioceses contained parishes in areas of extreme deprivation.
The “generous” parish-share system in Chester meant that his parish was asked for only 45 per cent of a standard parish share, while wealthy ones paid up to 145 per cent. But this was still hard to meet “when you are part of a parish where a large number of the congregation are living and giving out of Universal Credit or PIP [Personal Independence Payment] or state pension”.
The motion — “born out of frustration” — was “modest”, he suggested. “To say I’m disappointed by the response is an understatement.”
The amendment was brought by Carl Hughes, who chairs the Archbishops’ Council’s Finance Committee. It repeated the call for a review of the formula and processes of distribution, but “as part of the wider review of the Church’s funding framework for ministry” and with no stipulations about the shape of the review in terms of data sets or mechanisms.
Mr Hughes expressed concern that the approach set out in the motion “moves decisions about how best to support local parishes from diocesan leadership to national church bodies. It would also remove accountability over such funding from diocesan synods. . .
“In my opinion, the use of a national formula to determine local deployment is absolutely not desirable and indicative of a level of centralisation that many in this chamber complain about regularly.”
Any review must take into account the resources that dioceses themselves could deploy, “and should not weaken the core virtue of mutuality of support among parishes within a diocese”, he argued.
A paper provided by the Synod’s Secretary-General, William Nye, warned that, unamended, the motion would “shift funding to some non-LInC dioceses but reduce allocations to current recipients unless overall funding increases”.
Concern about this was expressed in speeches against the motion from representatives of dioceses currently in receipt of the funding.
Bishop North said that the unamended motion risked putting “at threat” the “growing vibrancy of the urban Church”, by reducing disbursements to existing recipients. It also undermined the principle that wealthier areas should support more deprived ones, he said. “It means that funding will flow into wealthier dioceses at the direct expense of more deprived dioceses.”
But other speakers argued in favour of increasing the LInC-funding total. The Church’s 2024 accounts showed that this was affordable, Emma Robarts (St Albans) said.
“Money is about the only problem the Church doesn’t have,” she said. LInC funding was “the difference between ministry surviving and ministry collapsing in places where the Church of England is often the last functioning institution”.
She went on to express concern that a debate on disbursing funding to dioceses, including support for local stipendiary ministry — a response to the Synod’s request that it be enabled to express its view early in the next triennium — was not due to take place until 2027.
“This is classic administrative capture: working out their answer before we are allowed to discuss it,” she said. “The problem is immediate and urgent. . . We do not want the legacy of Vision and Strategy to be the death through neglect of the parishes.”
Andrew Gray (St Edmundsbury & Ipswich) suggested that the feeding of the five thousand “wouldn’t have happened had General Synod been involved”. He detected, rather than faith and hope, “fear that if we pass this something will go wrong”.
The motion was simply asking the Commissioners to review the formula and take into account two sets of data. Yet “anyone would think from some of the responses that what it was actually asking for is the nuclear access codes.” The Church had “a funding crisis in our poorest communities” while the Commissioners were “sitting on record amounts”.
The Synod paper provided by Mr Nye refers to “new guidance on the allocation and use of LInC funding” agreed by the Archbishops Council. “These include a clearer iteration of policy around the use of LInC funding by dioceses. This re-enforces the purpose of LInC funding as primarily for use in parishes in the 25 per cent of lower income areas.”
Last year, Mr Hughes told the Synod that only two-thirds of this was reaching parishes in this category — and he found this “disturbing” (News, 14 February 2025). The latest figure is 73 per cent.
This year, “light-touch” reporting had been introduced for dioceses. In response to a written question from the Revd Marcus Walker (London), the Archbishops’ Council had published a table showing the percentage of LInC allocated to the 25 per cent most deprived parishes in the last financial year.
This suggested a large variation: the percentage was lower than 50 per cent in six dioceses and 100 per cent in others. But dioceses and bishops have challenged the figures. “Many of us bishops do not recognise them,” the Archbishop of York told the debate.
The Archdeacon of Ashford, the Ven. Darren Miller, said that he had been “horrified” by the figure in Canterbury diocese, but had been told by the diocesan office that only 8.31 per cent went to parishes outside the 25 per cent. “The stats do not keep up with reality on the ground.”
A diocesan spokesman said on Wednesday that the figures “do not appear to reflect the distributions to areas of deprivation in Kent or the work done to support mission and ministry in those areas”.
The table suggested that, in the diocese of St Edmundsbury & Ipswich, 64 per cent of the funding went to parishes outside the 25 per cent.
On Wednesday, the diocesan secretary, Gary Peverley, said that, “as a primarily rural diocese, the economic makeup of our communities differs greatly to many other regions of the country.”
In 2024, he said, no parishes within the diocese had a population within the most-deprived 10 per cent nationally, while eight parishes had a population within the 25-per-cent most-deprived. Two of these parishes had been allocated 36 per cent of the funding, while the remainder had been allocated “with an understanding of local context, including the levels of local deprivation, other forms of financial support provided by the diocese, the financial health of the parish and population size”.
The diocesan secretary for Carlisle, Derek Hutton, said that he had “no idea what methodology has been used to arrive at this conclusion”, and that data showed that all of funding was “consistently targeted at Mission Communities that substantially consist of parishes in the top 25-per-cent most deprived”.
A spokesman for the diocese of Hereford said that the table did not “accurately reflect” the diocesan board of finance’s data submission to the Church of England, and that 100 per cent of the funding went to parishes in the most-deprived 25 per cent nationally.
In Truro, a spokeswoman said that the totality of LInC had been allocated to deaneries “who then used it in the best way to support their local context as set out in their plans. When we report to the National Church, where parishes are listed, that is where they are allocating money in their stipends to those working in areas of disadvantage.” She drew attention to the social action under way in deaneries, including work by Church Action on Poverty centres and foodbanks.
In 2022, the diocese reported that it had used LInC to plug its operating-budget deficit, and set out plans to redirect this to work in deprived communities, with half the sum supporting stipends in these areas (News, 2 June 2023).
The table suggested that, in the diocese of Blackburn, 22 per cent of the funding went to parishes outside the 25 per cent. “We neither recognise nor accept that data,” Bishop North said on Wednesday.
The diocese had been one of the first to ensure that every penny went to the most deprived parishes, and “hard evidence” could be provided, he said. “Those parishes see exactly how much they are receiving on their parish-share certificate and, following consultation, agreed that a small percentage be held back for pioneering projects in urban communities.”
When challenged, the NCIs had said that they used a different measure of deprivation, he said. But, even using this, the diocese could identify only two parishes not counted as deprived when this measure was used.
“There is now a serious charge on the public record that the diocese of Blackburn is not using LInC as intended, and we wholly refute that,” he said. “The use and abuse of LInC matters too much for people to be reaching conclusions on the basis of unreliable data. We call on the NCIs to withdraw their data, apologise, and reissue.”
On Wednesday, Mr Hughes spoke of the challenge of processing data from dioceses that “do everything slightly differently”. The NCIs had had a very short time in which to supply the answer to Fr Walker’s question, he said.
Some of the confusion had been caused by the fact that some of the dioceses’ answers had pertained, not only to LInC funding, but to separate transitional funding, he said. The table was “correct, but sort of misrepresents the situation”.
It would be “wrong to conclude” that LInC was not going to the most-deprived communities, although it remained the case that not all of it did so. The new reporting system meant that this issue would not be repeated, but he apologised “for any confusion that we’ve caused”.