PARISH CHURCHES? how do we keep our - Ecclesiological Society

HOW DO WE KEEP OUR PARISH CHURCHES? • KEEPING CHURCH BUILDINGS IN GOOD REPAIR 31
Table 3.4
English Heritage, grant expenditure, by type of
grant, 2002/3
Grant
Type of grant
expenditure
Secular buildings and monuments 24%
Places of worship grants 19%
Conservation areas 18%
Archaeology 14%
Aggregates Levy Historic
Environment
13%
Heritage Grant Fund 7%
Cathedral grants 5%
TOTAL 100% = £39m
Source: EH Annual report and accounts, 2002/3
may say that repairs up to £20k (which cost a total of about
£36m), are entirely funded by congregations. Repairs
larger than this cost around £50m, of which about £14m
(roughly one quarter) is found by congregations. 5
As can be seen from Table 3.2, funding from the State is
mainly available in the form of a VAT refund and grants,
totalling an estimated £28m pounds in 2002. As the
Bishop of London has pointed out, for example in the
speech reprinted at the front of this booklet, in #nancial
terms ‘the Church of England is the most disestablished
church in Western Europe’.
What would it cost to fund all repairs? Graph 3.1 shows
the annual cost to a fairy godperson who decided every
year to pay for all repairs above a certain size. For example,
if the fairy decided to fund all repairs costing more than
£20k, then the bill would be some £50m per year.
EH/HLF are the ‘superpowers’
The largest single provider of grants is English Heritage
with the Heritage Lottery Fund. The jointly administered
EH/HLF grant aid scheme may be regarded as the
Table 3.5
Heritage Lottery Fund, analysis of grants awarded under
grant programmes relevant to regeneration, 1995 – 2003 1
Grant programme
Number
of
projects
Funding
(£m)
%to
deprived
areas 3
Heritage grants 3511 1,600 38%
Parks 394 310 62%
Townscapes 266 99 47%
Places of worship 2 675 61 71%
Total 4846 £2.1bn
Notes
1. Grants awarded by HLF between 1 January 1995 and 3 October
2003, except Repair Grants for Places of Worship in England, which are
to April 2003. Monetary values are actual grants awarded and not
Stage 1 offers. HLF has other grant programmes: only those relevant to
regeneration are shown here.
2. Grants to places of worship apply to England only up to 2002 (via the
JPOW scheme), thereafter to the UK (via the RGPOW scheme). For more
details of these schemes, and annual breakdowns, see Appendix C.
3. Proportion of funding to deprived areas, defined (for England) as
the 50 most deprived local authorities. See text for discussion.
Source: New Life: Heritage and Regeneration, HLF, 2004. See note 6
below.
‘superpower’ in this sector, and has been for many years.
These two bodies dominate the #eld. Any withdrawal
would have a major impact.
Since 1986/7 (see Appendix C), a period of some
seventeen years, EH with (more recently) HLF have
granted about £313m in today’s money. This is
approximately £1,500 per listed church per year, in today’s
money, when averaged out over all CoE listed churches.
(This average is a simpli#cation, because Grade II
churches have not always been eligible, the HLF money
was for a time targeted on deprived areas, and some grants
are made to non-CoE places of worship.) Assuming that
listed churches have repair bills no higher than unlisted
ones (on which we have no reliable information), then in
recent years this source of grants has been paying for
about a quarter of repairs to listed churches, which, as we
have seen, run at an average £5,000 per church per year.
EH/HLF allocate grants on a demand-led basis,
distributing their limited funds according to the level of
applications in an area. The exception was a three-year
period, from April 1999 to March 2002, when HLF grants
(but not EH grants) were focused on deprived areas. As a
result, since 1995 more than £40m (71%) of the £61m
funds which HLF have provided for repairs to places of
worship went to such areas (Table 3.5). Five of the nine
A VICTORIAN COMPARISON
Between 1840 and 1875 more than 7,000 existing parish
churches (many of them medieval) were restored,
repaired or enlarged. This is more than double the
number of new churches built during that period. This
is the time widely regarded as having brought the bulk
of churches up to excellent physical condition, leaving
them in good shape for the next hundred or more years.
The details are provided in a report of 1876, which
gives the cost of works for nearly 2,200 cases, spread
over twelve dioceses. These have been analysed by
Chris Miele. The average total cost of this repair and
enlargement was £2,400 per church over 35 years, about
£70 per year. Today’s rate of expenditure on repairs alone
(not including enlargement) is £5k per year per church
(on average). In addition we spend an additional
amount each year on extending and improving
churches: I suspect this could be half as much again (on
average), making £7,500 per year per church.
How can we compare the Victorian with today’s
#gures? One way is to look at the mandays they would
buy. The Victorian £70 would, I think buy about one
manyear of manual labour, very roughly twice what
£7,500 today would buy.
So we are probably spending less than the Victorian
#gure. But we can perhaps achieve more with less
effort, through the use of technology.
There is one de#nite difference between now and
then. A very high proportion of the cost of the Victorian
work was born by rich individuals, with the rather small
remainder made up by parishioners. Today, most (about
60%) of the cost is borne by parishioners and their
fund-raising.
Main source: Chris Miele, ‘Their interest and habit’, in The Victorian
Church. See Bibliography.