By Catherine Pepinster
The Labour government wants to work with faith organisations as it drives forward its programme of national renewal, a leading member of the government said on Thursday.
According to Sir Stephen Timms, “no other networks can match the presence of faith communities”.
In the Religion Media Centre’s annual lecture at St Bride’s Church, off Fleet Street, Sir Stephen said the Covid pandemic had shown that “faith groups had the motivation, the resources, the buildings, the people and some cash to step up to help”.
Sir Stephen, who was formerly the chair of the all-party parliamentary group on faith and society, and is now a minister in the Department for Work and Pensions, said that faith covenants, where councils commit to work with faith groups, are vital. Prime minister Sir Keir Starmer recognises the importance of groups and wants to work with them, he also said.
“Faith groups,” Sir Stephen said, “are known and trusted by their communities.” They can reach hard to reach groups but as the government succeeds in its plans for rebuilding society and the economy, he predicted “they will no longer be exhausted filling in for an absent state”.
“I hope there will be less need for food bank, debt advice and homeless outreaches,” he said. “Then, their energies can be spent more on bettering and beautifying their communities, than adverting catastrophe in them.” Faith communities would then move on to “flourish, he predicted.
Sir Stephen outlined in detail the contribution that faith communities made and how the pandemic had transformed perceptions of them among both local and national politicians.
A study by Goldsmiths, University of London, commissioned when Sir Stephen chaired of the all-party parliamentary group, revealed that more than two-thirds of local authorities said they had partnered with faith groups since the pandemic began, with more than 90 per cent saying they had a very positive, or mostly positive, experience working with them. Now 32 local authorities have formed faith covenants, which help form networks of organisations offering services to their communities.
He also cited the role that faith organisations can play as the government focuses more on what is called social prescribing, recognised in the NHS Long Term Plan, as improving health by connecting people to groups and activities to improve their health and wellbeing. Preliminary findings from a study shows that more than 6,000 churches in the UK — 17 per cent of the total — run wellbeing initiatives.
Once, Sir Stephen said, councils would have given faith organisations a wide berth, in part because they feared faith groups would proselytise or would favour their own. But times have changed, and he gave his own example from Newham, where he has been MP for 30 years, during the pandemic, telling how on Good Friday 2020, he had received emails from constituents saying they did not have enough food for the Easter weekend.
He then discovered from the mayor of Newham that a local church was offering food parcels over the weekend for people — and they could help the people who had written to him.
Twenty-five years earlier, he said, he had been leader of Newham Council, and “at that time we were polite to churches, but we never worked with them, in the way that the current mayor was suggesting”.
Rather than sowing seeds of division today, he argued, “having lots of different faith groups means lots of people have that chance to belong. That builds cohesion.
“The threat to cohesion is not from people belonging to lots of different groups. It is from lots of people not belonging to anything at all, outside their own immediate family.”
Yet despite this greater willingness to work with faith organisations, there is still concern among faith groups that civil servants, local authority officials and local and national politicians do not understand faith.
This was confirmed by Colin Bloom’s study, commissioned by the previous government, into faith engagement. He cited low faith literacy across government, with public servants having poor or superficial knowledge of religion, while only a third of people questioned for Bloom’s study thought the government engaged meaningfully with faith groups.
While Sir Stephen’s lecture referred to growing involvement with faith groups, and the new government’s keenness to work with them, he admitted: “We do need that engagement to take place”
During the Q&A session afterwards, Sir Stephen was asked about the Bloom Report, to which the previous government never responded, and he said the new administration might need to take it over.
He also spoke about an action which the previous government took, which was to remove all funding from the Inter Faith Network, which led to its closure. It was a move that was “extraordinarily foolish”, he said, “taken just when we needed different faiths to talk to one another”.
Sir Stephen also spoke of the importance of RE teaching and the poor record of recruiting specialist teachers, with the Department for Education missing its target for employing secondary RE teachers during nine of the past 10 years. “We need a new impetus on that” he said. “People need to be properly equipped to teach RE.”
