Covid-19: Economy

Lord Archbishop of York Excerpts

Thursday 4th June 2020 Lords Chamber

[The Lord Bishop of Chelmsford]

My Lords, I want to follow the noble Lord, Lord Harries, in speaking about vision. The word “economy” comes from two Greek words: “oikos”, meaning household, and “nomos”, meaning law. Its literal meaning is “the law of the household”. A good economy is meant to be like a well-run household, where things are shared fairly and where everyone is catered for according to their needs. In a family, it is unthinkable that some are fed while others go hungry. Moreover, each member gladly makes the sacrifices necessary to contribute to the whole. These ideas of a common good, belonging to each other and mutual responsibility were a unifying force in the post-war consensus that created the welfare state. They had their roots in Christian social teaching.

As has been said, our last crisis did not lead to such a vision. After the financial crash 12 years ago, the banks were bailed out with public money, but it was paid for by reducing public services. Now, correctly in my view, the Government are paying for citizens to be furloughed and for increased health measures, but we do not have the unifying vision which will help us rebuild our nation, nor the will to pay for it proportionately.

What can we learn from this crisis? First, we need something more than a safety net. A safety net is not a vision; it is a last resort. We need a vision for a society where everyone is raised up and where everyone recognises their responsibility to the whole, as in a household.

Covid-19 is not indiscriminate. It disproportionately affects the BAME community and the poor, it reduces opportunities for the young and it highlights deepening inequalities in our society. Wealthy people can work from home; poor people cannot. But Covid-19 is nothing compared with the environmental challenge the world faces. Simply getting the economy up and running in the next year might help balance the books, but it will be a disaster for the next generation. We need an economic reset that is based around the common good and the well-being of the planet: anything less will not be economical.

Social Housing

Lord Archbishop of York Excerpts

Thursday 31st January 2019 Lords Chamber

[The Lord Bishop of Chelmsford]

As Bishop of Chelmsford, I am also proud to be the Bishop of Becontree, Harlow and Basildon, three of the nation’s boldest attempts by policymakers in the last century to address the housing needs of London and the south-east. When Becontree was built in the 1920s, it was Europe’s largest public housing development. The Government were then building homes fit for heroes after the First World War, and London County Council had a bold vision for 27,000 new homes and the infrastructure that went with them, which we do not see in housing estates today. There are many being built across Essex. It is great to move in, provided that you do not own a car—there is nowhere to park it—and provided that nobody who ever visits you has a car, because there is nowhere for them either.

The era of large housing estates has gone, but so has the vision to build proper communities. I therefore very enthusiastically support the Motion from the noble Lord, Lord Whitty, and the need to increase our commitment to provide social housing. This debate is very timely. We all see the reason for this in the terrible rise in homelessness. I pay tribute to the work done by churches and charities up and down this country to support those who are homeless.

Until fairly recently, most of us would grow up, live, work and raise a family in the same place, but we now live networked lives. We therefore end up gravitating towards living beside people who look and think as we do. But the danger is that a networked, aspirational society becomes a disintegrated society, a society with rising levels of aspiration but correspondingly higher levels of discontentment and unhappiness. Let me put it plainly: there is something wrong and we store up great trouble for ourselves when people cannot even aspire to live in the communities where they grew up.

Creating more diverse but integrated communities is challenging but it provides a better context for human flourishing, so please forgive me for making a theological point: you cannot be yourself on your own. The only way we can fully be what we are meant to be is in community with each other. The answer is plain and it is, of course, our common expectation: builders and developers must ensure that a significant proportion of the dwellings they build is affordable social housing.

However, we know that this is not happening. Let me point out one reason that we could address. Using what are known as viability assessments, developers can avoid or reduce the proportion of dwellings set aside for social or affordable housing, arguing that such housing undermines the overall profitability of the development. I am not suggesting that builders develop sites without profit but we could look at this—it could be more transparent—and then we could build not only housing developments but communities.

Housing: Availability and Affordability

Lord Archbishop of York Excerpts

Thursday 12th October 2017 Lords Chamber

[The Lord Bishop of Chelmsford]

My Lords, I too thank the noble Lord, Lord Smith of Leigh, for securing this debate and the noble Lord, Lord Greaves, for his comments. I would like to make a slightly different point about housing as a spiritual issue. It is not just about meeting physical needs but about providing the stability and security without which no one can grow and flourish. I think we all agree, therefore, that there is little doubt that the scarcity of affordable housing is one of the most urgent crises facing our nation, for it affects our cohesion, our well-being and our prosperity, and the growing homelessness on our streets is the outward sign of an inward and debilitating spiritual malaise.

We heard about figures in Manchester. The housing charity, Crisis, estimates that on any one night in Britain at the moment, 8,000 people are sleeping rough. There are 39,000 households living in hostels and 60,000 people surfing from sofa to sofa. That is before we have considered the thousands of people who want to get on the housing ladder but cannot afford it. I am involved with a number of homeless charities in Essex and east London where I serve, and see the sad and exhausting consequences of this day after day.

The cost of a home—and I underline the word “home”—whether bought or rented, is at the mercy of market forces. London is in danger of becoming a city where teachers, nurses, social workers and even Christian ministers can no longer afford to live, and where ordinary and even relatively well-off middle-class families, the young and the disadvantaged are forced out by escalating prices. Yes, we need a strategic plan.

Jesus famously said that:

“In my Father’s house there are many homes”.


Today, we need a progressive and imaginative housing policy that has many types of homes within it—a much greater diversity. We have heard, and I am sure we will continue to hear in the course of this debate, many statistics. I will not read out a load more, but I want to make it clear that while we applaud what has been done and what is being done, more needs to be done, and it needs to be more joined up.

The challenge in rural areas is particularly acute. The effect of the lack of appropriate housing in rural areas is starting to show in terms of the lack of public services. Primary schools that two decades ago had enough pupils to provide high-quality education are now struggling. The recent change in the funding formula for schools will, I fear, see many more close, and it is housing policies that will enable families with children to return to the heart of rural communities. But it is not only schools that suffer. This lack of social diversity, with predominantly older people in villages and hamlets and long-term families priced out of communities where they would have expected to live in the past, means that a wide range of public services—health, social care, transport and so forth—are under threat.

Again, I see this at first hand in rural north Essex and in many Essex council towns. But as well as rural, the diocese where I serve is urban. In Walthamstow, average house prices have risen by nearly a third in the last couple of years. Even small houses in Walthamstow can now cost £500,000. Historically, this was a community for working-class people, but no longer, and we know that this is repeated all over London. Younger people with families who bought shared equity or other forms of starter homes are unable to move into larger properties. But housing developers favour larger houses with larger prices. I therefore find, as I go about, that I hear stories of children of different genders having to share a bedroom long beyond the ideal age—which in other policies such as the bedroom tax the Government have set at 10—and children and parents having to sleep in the sitting room in order create enough sleeping space. We are in danger of creating ghettos where high-income and low-income households live separately. In London and in the countryside that is getting acute. So we not only need more building, but variety and diversity of tenure and in the right place.

In rural areas, it used to be required that the development of smaller plots included social housing. However, that requirement has been removed and it is unclear from recent Parliamentary Answers to Written Questions from the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of St Albans whether any monitoring of this policy’s impact has been made.

Finally, I want to say something about the difference between a house and a home, a housing estate and a community. A house becomes a home, and a housing estate a community, when it provides for not just a physical need but contributes to the diversity of provision for individuals and families through a wider network of the schools, healthcare, other services, recreation—of course, I will also say—churches, mosques, temples and synagogues that make a community work.

The Church, with our roots in every community, is able and willing to help; already we are, in our own small way, pioneering a number of imaginative solutions. In Gloucester, a vicarage redevelopment is providing a new vicarage and a load of other social housing as well. In east London, our diocese is planning to redevelop a number of church sites where the church buildings were either badly built or badly designed. We reckon we can provide 600 affordable housing units, as well as worship space and community facilities.

We need imagination and conviction as well as investment. It is not just about building houses, but building homes; not just about new estates, but flourishing communities; not just about putting a roof over someone’s head, but a foundation beneath their feet.

Race Disparity Audit

Lord Archbishop of York Excerpts

Tuesday 10th October 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Young of Cookham]

I agree with my noble friend. One positive fact that emerged from this audit was that 85% of ethnic minority people believe that they are British and identify very strongly with their community. That is a very positive sign. My noble friend is right that in many of these indicators, the Indian community does well; but, by contrast, they reveal that the Bangladeshi community does not do nearly so well on many of the same indicators. We need to understand the reasons, address them and see whether we can bring those members of the ethnic minorities who do not achieve quite as well as the Indian community in the respect that my noble friend mentioned up to the same standard.

[The Lord Bishop of Chelmsford]

My Lords, although, let me be clear, the Church of England has nothing to teach anyone else on this subject—our record is not a good one—in the diocese of Chelmsford, where I serve, which includes the east London boroughs, which have some of the most diverse communities in Europe, we have found that of course there is racism and xenophobia but there is also what has been explained to me as unconscious bias. It is not quite the same as racism; it is those things which prevent us from seeing each other as clearly as we need to. Both in the Church of England generally and in the diocese where I serve, we have done a lot of training over the past couple of years to help people to see their own unconscious bias towards people, and this is already bearing fruit in the church context with black and global majority people coming forward into positions. I wondered whether the Government had looked at that both for us and in wider society to try to move the debate on beyond the binary thing of, “Somebody is a racist or they are not”.

[Lord Young of Cookham]

I welcome the work which the right reverend Prelate has been doing in east London, in his diocese. If there is a template there, a model of working which can have wider application, of course the Government would be interested. One thing that I discovered from going on to the website this morning, which I had not appreciated before, is that black people are disproportionately more likely to engage in voluntary work than any other group. If one digs into the audit, there is a lot of good news there about ethnic minorities, which I hope we can now put in a wider domain. If we can build on the good work that the Church has done in east London and apply it to some other areas where there are big ethnic minority populations, the Government would be delighted.