By Ruth Peacock
A report on Faith in the City, exploring the religious affiliation of the workforce in London’s square mile, has been launched in an event sponsored by the City of London Corporation.
The report pulled together public statistics and the results of a survey of 1,000 employees, plus focus groups, asking questions about the importance of faith while at work and the support they felt should be provided in the City.
It recommends that there should be a chaplaincy without walls, with a “Deliveroo-style” mobile chaplaincy service, where clerics on bikes provide pastoral care and consultancy; religious literacy training with a kitemark scheme; and flagship events celebrating faith communities and key festivals.
The project’s aim is to “make the City of London the most faith-friendly and religiously literate business community in the world, enabling it to attract and retain the very best global talent”.
The City has 685,000 workers and 8,500 residents, with one of the most international workforces across the globe. Of those, 49 per cent come from outside the UK, and 37 per cent are black, Asian or from a minority ethnic origin.
The survey examined the need for faith provision. It found that although there were 36 churches in the square mile, there was a lack of accommodation, amenities and provision for people of other faiths, who made up a quarter of the workforce.
For example, one person resorted to praying in a stairwell because there was no space in their office. A visitor had their lunch brought in from a kosher kitchen by Deliveroo, involving a 90-minute wait.
The report was compiled by a project team of three people – Rabbi Alex Goldberg, Dean of Religious Life at the University of Surrey; Michael Wakelin, chair of the Religion Media Centre; and Sughra Ahmed, social entrepreneur and former Associate Dean of Religious Life at Stanford University.
The team described the report as a “landmark research and engagement programme”, and Sughra Ahmed outlined the main findings.
She noted that while many staff felt part of a faith community where they lived, far fewer did at work — an important gap, she said, as people need to belong to the City as whole individuals, not just as cogs in a wheel.
About 70 per cent of Muslims, Dharmic faiths and Jews felt there was a lack of awareness of their faith traditions at work, with people feeling uncomfortable mentioning prayer or fasting. One quote was: “There’s lots of support for gender and sexuality, but none for faith. We’re invisible.”
The survey found that people were hiring makeshift spaces around the city for events or festivals.
Half of the workforce surveyed from Muslim and Dharmic traditions said they would spend more time in the City if there were greater faith support.
There were practical dilemmas for those from these traditions. The absence of food choices or prayer spaces meant a typical long City day, from 8am to 10pm was very difficult to manage for people with faith obligations.
Only one café has “VHK” rating — vegan, halal and kosher — and that café belongs to a church. One survey response was that it was difficult to take clients with dietary obligations to lunch because there was such a lack of choice.
This was a further indication of the need for religious literacy, according to Michael Wakelin. The report envisages religious literacy training with a kitemark, he said, which would ensure that all organisations and businesses within the square mile were excellent at incorporating religion and religious practices in the workplace.
The failure to acknowledge faith in the workplace adequately pointed to a deeper issue around loyalty and commitment for Lord Williams of Oystermouth, a former Archbishop of Canterbury, and patron of the Faith in the City project.
He described the time after the 2008 financial crash when he met young people working in the City, who told him of a “deficit in the understanding of trust and commitment” at work.
“They felt that they had not been in a culture which prized a genuine sense of a commitment to shared values, common goals, a commitment to one another in the shared processes of work,” Lord Williams said.
“They felt that they had been formed into an individualistic and competitive mindset, that they’d been squeezed into a setting where their own deepest personal commitments and aspirations were not listened to all that seriously, and many working patterns meditated against this.”
There was a need “to create a trusting, trustworthy, dependable, committed culture — humanisation”. Lord Williams praised the work of churches in the square mile, which, he said, were in the front line, engaging with communities, doing pastoral work, encouraging the arts.
City of London data says that almost a quarter of the workforce are from faiths other than Christianity, a number that has almost doubled in 20 years, while the number of Christians has halved from 69 per cent to 35 per cent.
This project was not about reinventing the wheel, but “sometimes there needs to be a more regular, a more resourceful way of feeding into the actual working practice and culture of the working place”.
Lord Williams advocated the value of partnerships, looking for the resources already there and asking how they could be linked, enhanced, deepened, brought alive in new contexts.
Those partnerships should be global, said Rabbi Alex Goldberg. He envisaged partnering with faith groups but also national and global organisations to forge new discussions around economics, values, ethical leadership and faith in the workplace.
He said the City could be a global leader in the model of community that the project creates: “Trade together, talk together, interact together.”
The initiative was about building a City without walls, where faith, ethics, and civic life work hand in hand.
James Thompson, deputy policy chairman of the City of London Corporation, said the event recognised “something fundamental about this square mile”, in its diversity and difference, and the City of London Corporation was committed to ensuring that its cosmopolitan inheritance is honoured.
He said the attack on the Manchester synagogue and assaults on mosques highlighted the need to act. “Ours is an age in which deep division and violent bigotry threaten the safety, both physical and psychological, of communities,” Mr Thompson said. “So, it is more important than ever that in a climate of fear and isolation, we renew and affirm our commitment to make the square mile an inclusive and welcoming destination.”
The project is now seeking funding from businesses, foundations and benefactors and is establishing an advisory group to move to the next stage.
