Public Bodies Bill [HL]

Debate between Lord Bishop of Chester and Viscount Eccles

Monday 7th March 2011 Lords Chamber

[Viscount Eccles]

My Lords, I do not want to detain the House for a long time and I shall not. My noble friend Lord Deben has gone too far, as he did when he did not renew me as chairman of the Royal Botanic Gardens Kew. He came to a very bad judgment about that and I entirely support the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Leicester in his thesis.

I make one practical point about the Zurbaráns in Auckland Castle. The Church Commissioners are responsible for £5 billion worth of financial and property assets. The income from that funds 16 per cent of the church’s expenditure. The other 84 per cent comes, largely, from the congregations of the church and from, as the right reverend Prelate said, appeals for repairs and appeals for lead for the roof which needs renewing and so on. I think that the Church Commissioners and the church should take account of two things as they consider the position of the Zurbaráns. They need the support of their congregations. I do not think that it is certain that they will get £15 million for the Zurbaráns. The last time that this came up, as the noble Lord, Lord Foster of Bishop Auckland, will remember, the Bowes Museum got an estimate from the market—not from Christie's or Sotheby's—and quoted £6 million, not £15 million or £20 million, which I think was the Sotheby's quote. So there is an issue about the risk which the Church Commissioners are taking with these pictures, which has nothing to do with the romantic story of Bishop Trevor, and that one of the pictures is a copy by Mr Pond for 24 guineas and the other pictures cost 21 guineas each. That is a very romantic story that has all the connotations of the disabilities of the Jews and all those things.

However, if the congregation in the north-east supported a solution which meant that the Church Commissioners could add on, shall I say, £12 million to £5 billion, you could say that that is likely to be a good judgment, not a bad one. With respect to the noble Lord, Lord Howarth, I do not think that the church has to hang on to every asset. One could suggest that it sells the divorce papers of Henry VIII from Catherine of Aragon, which sit in the library in Lambeth Palace. I do not know how much they would make, but I would guess quite a lot of money.

We should not get tremendously excited about this. It is a practical issue, as the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Leicester has presented it to us. It is full of practical judgments, but the church needs the support of its congregations. I say rather quietly that in the north-east, there is the Dean of Durham—I remind the House that there is no Bishop of Durham at the moment. Durham Cathedral has an appeal out now. Are the Church Commissioners absolutely certain that they will not lose by raising £12 million and having an income of £360,000 a year—the Church Commissioners’ assets yield 3 per cent—because congregations will say, “If you can do this and that, we are not going to give you so much money every Sunday or when you make an appeal”?

[The Lord Bishop of Chester]

I know that the hour is late and I shall make only a few brief comments to put certain things on the record—not repeating, I hope, what has been said. I declare an interest as a member of the board of governors of the Church Commissioners —four bishops are elected to the board.

The first is to say that the Church Commissioners is a charity. I ask the Minister whether any of the other bodies listed in Schedule 3 is a registered charity. That is an important question to ask if we are thinking of adding the Church Commissioners to the list. The Church of England itself is not a public authority. That was clarified by the Judicial Committee of your Lordships' House a few years ago in the Aston Cantlow case. It is a public authority for only certain limited purposes. We have been speaking in a carefree way, as if the Church of England is simply a public authority. It is not. For certain purposes it is, and there is a rather delicate ecology that lies behind everything here. There is no such legal entity as the Church of England. The Church of England is a symbiotic, organic collection of different bodies, each with certain degrees of independence. The noble Lord, Lord Inglewood, was wrong when he said that in no legal sense are the Church Commissioners part of the Church of England. They are part of that symbiotic connection, and you can disturb that and lots of other things without intending to do so.

The cost of maintaining the historic houses has progressively risen and taken a progressively greater proportion of the income of the Church Commissioners for several decades. That poses the question: how do you responsibly allocate the income for different purposes when you find that the cost of maintaining historic houses, which we know is great, is a constant upward pressure? Those are the decisions that the Church Commissioners are best placed to handle.