As Rishi Sunak was entering 10 Downing Street as prime minister and promising to tackle the nation’s economic crisis, a former civil servant — no stranger to the Treasury — was getting to grips with the cost of repairing and maintaining church buildings.
Sir Philip Rutnam worked at the Treasury for 15 years before he became permanent secretary at the Home Office. He left that post in 2020 and has just taken over as chairman of the National Churches Trust, a charity that distributes grants to enable religious buildings to stay open and to thrive.
Sir Philip was asked at a Religion Media Centre briefing why it was important to talk about the future of church buildings at a time of political and economic turmoil. “It is exactly because they provide a daily focal point, a source of support, and comfort and a centre for countless communities, in often very humble but reliable and real ways, that we should be caring about those buildings,” he said.
There are 39,000 buildings still in use for worship across the four nations, but 3,000 have been lost in the past 10 years and the rate of closures shows no sign of abating.
Of those, 350 of the Church of England’s buildings are at risk of being shut or demolished. An estimated £1bn will need to be found for the upkeep of its churches over the next five years.
The Church of Scotland is looking at disposing of 30 churches — in a country that has lost 15 per cent of its religious buildings since 2000. Wales has lost 11 per cent over the same period.
Sir Philip said more than half of the country’s historically or architecturally significant buildings were places of worship, but he focused on their social role. There are more food banks than branches of McDonald’s in the country, he said, and churches were at the heart of running them.
Last year the National Churches Trust suggested that the annual social and economic value of church buildings stood at about £55bn a year. The analysis drew on techniques used by the Treasury’s “Green Book”, which attempts to measure the economic and social value of activities.
Using these techniques meant the value of volunteering was measured not only by assessing the impact on those the volunteers serve, but by recognising the impact on the wellbeing of volunteers themselves, he said.
“We know from lots of studies, that volunteering has a significant benefit to the people who are volunteers. It raises their level of engagement, their level of enjoyment of life, the quality of their life typically improves and churches depend on volunteers.
“So the value of volunteering to the life of the country is huge,” Sir Philip said. “When you look at these different types of benefit and use the government’s standard measures of wellbeing, and how much is that worth … I would say that the 55 billion figure is almost certainly an underestimate.”
The Covid pandemic has added to the burden of churches in finding the means to maintain their buildings. The National Lottery Heritage Fund discontinued a scheme specifically targeting places of worship in 2017, meaning that they must compete for cash alongside organisations that may have many more resources for fundraising.
Scott Rennie, a minister in the Church of Scotland, said churches often felt at a disadvantage. “There’s a sense that often one status as a faith community can work against you in terms of accessing funding,” he said. “I’m quite curious as to what we can do about it — not to take away from our responsibility for buildings, but to say to the government, ‘We need your help in terms of providing a better environment for grant funding’.”
Sir Philip thought government at all levels had historically been a bit doubtful about working with faith communities but the situation was improving.
The Church in Wales recently announced that it was releasing £100m of capital reserves to spend on serving its communities. Its property manager, Alex Glanville, said that while some of the money would inevitably be spent on buildings, this was not the starting point for the church’s deliberations on where the money should go.
“I think we don’t have a building problem, we have a people problem,” he said, “And with tiny congregations, or not necessarily tiny congregations, but very tired congregations, they need some inspiration and help.”
His words resonated with Conta Rowan Hamilton from Save the Parish, a network that was founded last year and wants to see more of the Church of England’s resources spent at parish level, including its buildings, and less on centralised activities.
“Financing buildings has become more and more the lot of the local parishioners and they are tired,” she said. “The Church of England has the money. It’s just a question of where its spent. At the moment, it’s being spent in places which are not supporting the local parish at a time of great difficulty. Of course you can apply for money but you have to dance to their tune.”
Earlier this month the CofE announced it would be providing £15m for dioceses to help churches struggling with energy costs.
About 30 churches in Scotland are facing closure as part of the Church of Scotland’s five-year mission plan, which looking at the future of parishes and their sustainability.
The church’s principal clerk, the Rev Fiona Smith, said religious divisions through the centuries meant some small towns may have three or four church buildings. “We need our churches to be the right spaces in the right places,” she added.
Sir Philip warned of taking decisions that could turn out with hindsight to have been short-sighted. He used Richard Beeching’s reviews of the railways in the 1960s as an example.
“A lot of railway lines were closed for ostensibly very rational business-like reasons without enough regard to the communities that they served. And now the government has been spending billions of pounds, looking at how it can reopen some of those lines.
“If they had only been kept more of those lines going, they would have found a new purpose as transport patterns change and people’s expectations of how they get around change. So, let’s not lose what we have. Let’s not sleepwalk into another Beeching.”
His message to the chancellor of the exchequer, he said, would be that the government could achieve a “triple win” with modest amounts of money by entering partnership with communities and church denominations.
“You’d get communities with a renewed sense of pride; you get a legacy of heritage, which could last for the next 100 or 200 years. And you would get that wellbeing for the people who may not be members of the church, but might come there because they’re vulnerable and desperate, really on the margins of society.
“We see again and again that it’s churches and church buildings which are trusted and able to reach those people. So, you would get a triple win, chancellor. And the number doesn’t need to be very big, but you can make a very big impact.”
