PARISH CHURCHES? how do we keep our - Ecclesiological Society

HOW DO WE KEEP OUR PARISH CHURCHES? • KEEPING CHURCH BUILDINGS IN GOOD REPAIR 29
Table 3.1
Actual spending on major repairs to church buildings, by amount of spend (2001)
Total repair spend during period was £86.4m
Parishes (actual)
Churches (estimate)
Amount spent
%of
parishes
No. of
parishes
%of
churches
No. of
churches
£m spent on
repairs
zero 42 5440 50 8100 0.0
up to £1k 9 1170 8 1300 0.6
£1k – £5k 24 3100 20 3250 8.1
£5k – £10k 10 1300 9 1460 10.9
£10k – £20k 8 1040 7 1130 17.0
£20k – £50k 5 650 4.3 700 24.4
More than £50k 2 260 1.7 280 25.5
100% =
12,951
parishes
12,951 100% =
16,220
churches
Source: first column, CoE, personal communication; remaining columns, see Technical note.
16220 £86.4m
Technical note: the figures in the first
column refer to parishes. Many
parishes have more than one
church, and I have estimated the
effect of this in the in the remaining
column. I did this by considering how
multi-church parishes might have
behaved. At one extreme,
multi-church parishes undertaking
repairs might have only repaired one
of their church buildings, and never
more than one. At the other extreme,
multi-church parishes undertaking
repairs might have repaired all their
church buildings. These
assumptions gave a maximum of
54% and a minimum of 42% of
church buildings not undergoing
repairs. I chose an approximately
central point of 50% for this figure,
and scaled the remaining figures to
add up to 100%. None of this affects
the fundamentals of the argument
made in the text.
3.2 What is the pattern of repairs?
Large repairs are unusual
What is the pattern of repair expenditure over time for an
individual church?
To obtain some idea of this I looked at repair
expenditure over a period of 25 years for #ve
randomly-chosen churches from the CCT portfolio.
Three features stood out, none of them helpful to a group
of volunteers trying to budget ahead.
First there were many years (very approximately, one
half) where the necessary repair expenditure (on top of
routine maintenance) was zero. Secondly in those years
where repairs were required, the cost varied greatly, and
was only occasionally particularly large. Finally, the #ve
individual CCT churches varied from each other in the
total required over the 25-year period. A key question is
whether this was predictable at the beginning of the
period, but I suspect in some cases it was not: that is, that
the scale of repairs was not foreseeable at the beginning of
the quarter century.
We can approach the pattern of expenditure another
way. In 2001 the total spent on church repairs was £86m,
and the average per church was approximately £5,000.
However – and this is crucial – nearly four #fths of
churches (an estimated 78%) either spent nothing at all or
spent less than £5,000 (Table 3.1). Nearly nineteen out of
twenty churches spent less than £20k, and for these
churches the average spend was approximately £2,500. It is
the very small number of high-spending churches who in
any one year raise the average to £5,000 per church.
It is important to appreciate how unusual is a repair
spend above £50k: only approximately 2% of churches,
roughly one in #fty, spend this much in a given year. To
put it another way, based on this data, any average church
building might reasonably hope to go for twenty years
spending an average of £2,500 per year, and #fty years
without having to #nd a repair bill of more than £50k.
Many of us are so used to appeals for major funds that
this pattern of expenditure may be a surprise.
This erratic requirement for repairs cannot be easy for
churches, many of which are, after all, relatively small
voluntary organisations. When deciding between a youth
worker or new toilets or putting aside money for
unknown possible future repairs, it must be tempting to
take the chance that when the next repair bill does come
in a few years’ time it will be one of the smaller rather
than larger ones, and to hope that over the longer term
this church is going to be one of the less expensive ones.
Unfortunately, I have no information as to how
expenditure is broken down between different classes of
church – urban versus rural, for example, or medieval
compared to Victorian. Urban Victorian churches are said
to be considerably more expensive, but I do not have the
data to demonstrate that.
Incentives
In other situations, the occurrence of occasional,
unpredictable, very expensive events is often solved by
pooling risk, through a commercial or governmentfunded
‘insurance’ scheme (two examples are the NHS
and private household insurance). In this case, the grant
agencies provide something similar, but in two different
ways there is ‘moral hazard’.
First, there is no incentive to spend money on routine
maintenance, because grants do not depend on having
been careful in this respect.
Secondly, the largest grant-making body (EH/HLF)
reduces grants in line with any repair money previously
put aside, a clear disincentive to save for repair work. This
is not a trivial issue to resolve: in previous years, when the
grants did not take account of savings, it might have been
argued (and probably was – I have not investigated) that
more money was being given to some churches than they
required, and was therefore not being directed to the areas
of greatest need. Possibly some form of taper-relief would
be an appropriate way to encourage saving, whilst
concentrating on the most needy.