By Tim Wyatt
The great reset between councils and faith groups prompted by the pandemic has continued and even expanded, a new report has concluded.
Keeping the Faith 2.0 was commissioned by the All-Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) on Faith and Society as a follow-up to a 2020 report on how religious charities and organisations had worked in partnership with local authorities during the pandemic.
While the first lockdown had seen councils collaborate quickly with faith groups on emergency food provision and distribution, now the scope of the work was expanding into vaccination and healthcare provision, domestic violence, climate change, refugees, hate crime and even fostering and adoption.
The report’s author, Professor Chris Baker from Goldsmiths University of London, said his team had carried out dozens of interviews with key figures in local government and the faith sector and had detected a clear and continuing cultural shift.
Until as recently as five years ago, councils had been wary or even hostile to religious groups seeking to collaborate around social action projects, he said.
But being thrown together by the crisis of the pandemic had broken down barriers and meant productive new relationships were forming, going far beyond emergency provision and towards more long-term partnerships.
Sir Stephen Timms, the veteran Christian Labour MP who chairs the APPG, acknowledged at the report’s launch in Westminster on Wednesday that religious people were regarded as “rather weird” and as such slightly shunned by local authorities.
“As a result, communities have missed out on the contribution faith groups can offer,” he lamented. “But the pandemic changed this because councils had to depend on churches, mosques, synagogues, temples and gurdwaras. Not because they wanted to be nice to the faith groups, but because in community after community only faith groups were in a position to provide the vital lifesaving support that was needed.”
The pandemic contribution of Britain’s religious communities was also hailed by Paul Scully, the faith minister, who reported halfway through the event to cheering that he had just found out that Liz Truss, the new prime minister, was keeping him on in the job.
“I know you will continue to provide seemingly limitless reserves of commitment and goodwill and trust to people who face difficult times,” he told the audience of faith leaders, charity workers and local government officials. “The government wants to work with you on that, to co-create the kind of solutions and world we want to live in.”
Keeping the Faith 2.0, unlike its predecessor, did not offer any empirical survey data to support its findings but instead was based on interviews with 35 individuals, mostly working in the faith-based social action sector.
“Pre-pandemic, faith-based engagements in this field were largely piecemeal, small-scale and volunteer-led. Post-pandemic, the situation seems likely to be transformed,” the report states.
This is particularly true of local health provision, which has become more tightly integrated with faith groups as a result of vaccination and testing programmes during Covid. Expect more places of worship to have clinical facilities attached, and more professional healthcare workers operating out of worship centres in the future, the report predicts.
While councils can bring authority and knowledge to the table, they cannot match the resources, from buildings to networks to volunteers, credibility and most importantly the motivation that religious communities offer.
Dr Russell Rook from the Good Faith Partnership, who also spoke at the launch, said religious organisations existed to “make good stuff happen”. “Churches don’t want to lose the experience of the pandemic — they want to do more,” he added. One example he gave was of the Warm Welcome project, which had already seen 1,000 churches pledge to open their buildings to offer heating to those who couldn’t afford it at home over the coming winter.
Laura Marks, the founder of Mitzvah Day, echoed this, arguing that there would be plenty of opportunities for faith groups to build on their pandemic achievements in coming months as the cost-of-living crisis bit harder.
But it was not all good news. A recurring theme was the need for a new model to finance this collaboration between faith-based charities and local councils.
“Many respondents regarded the traditional funding models as no longer fit for purpose in a post-Covid 19 world. More and more people chase less and less money,” Professor Baker remarked.
Austerity had shredded the budgets of most local authorities, meaning far too many faith groups’ bids for public cash to deliver services were rebuffed, crushing morale.
Several of those present mentioned, during a brief question time, this problem, querying how any of this huge cultural reset could go ahead in an era of no money. Some asked if the private sector could be squeezed to pay for some of it and fill in the gaps.
But Mr Scully said there were new things happening, pointing to a pilot programme called the Faith New Deal.
Prompted by an earlier post-Covid report by Conservative MP Danny Kruger, the government had earmarked a pot of £1m to be given to faith-based groups working on five areas of mental health, debt advice, employability, food poverty and boosting volunteering.
Sixteen organisations had successfully bid for the first tranche of cash from this pot, Mr Scully said, and ministers were firmly on board with pushing this further.
“That’s an idea I believe in and the government believes in. When we work together, we are more than the sum of our parts. That’s just as important now as it was during Covid, and faith groups will be vital to get through the months ahead.”
