Public Bodies Bill [HL]

Debate between Lord Faulkner of Worcester and Lord Boswell of Aynho

Monday 7th March 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Faulkner of Worcester]

My Lords, I support Amendment 70A, to which I have added my name. The Committee should be greatly indebted to the noble Lord, Lord Inglewood, for tabling it. As far as I can establish, this is the first time for many years that your Lordships have had the opportunity to debate the activities of the Church Commissioners. My trawl of this House’s Hansard for the past five years has not produced a single example. That is in contrast to the other place, where the Second Church Estates Commissioner answers Questions for up to 15 minutes every month. He represents the Church of England in the House of Commons. Curiously, seven Members of this House—two most reverend Primates, four right reverend Prelates and the Lord Speaker—are all currently Church Commissioners, yet none of them speaks officially for them. I understand that, until 1977, it was possible for Members of your Lordships’ House to address questions to the Archbishop of Canterbury, but that was done away with on the advice of the Procedure Committee. Given what the noble Lord, Lord Inglewood, said about the de facto public body nature of the Church Commissioners and the fact that they appear to be exempt from the Freedom of Information Act, there appears to me to be an accountability deficit relating to their activities to which we should perhaps return on another occasion.

Perhaps I may use this opportunity briefly to express my concern over how the commissioners are managing and attempting to sell one of the finest see houses in the country, Hartlebury Castle—referred to by the noble Lord, Lord Inglewood—which was the home of the Bishops of Worcester from the 13th century up to 2007. It is a grade 1 listed building. It contains the magnificent Hurd Library, which was created in 1782 by Bishop Hurd, an ancestor of the noble Lord, Lord Hurd of Westwell, and is the last example in Britain of an integrated library containing the books for which it was originally created. There is also a great hall and a marvellous chapel, which reminded me when I went round it of the one depicted in the original television production of Brideshead Revisited.

Since 1966, the north wing of Hartlebury Castle has housed the Worcestershire County Museum, which also occupies a number of outbuildings on the site. In 2007, on the retirement of Bishop Selby, the commissioners decided that his successor, John Inge, should have his residence in the city of Worcester in a house by the cathedral and announced their intention to sell Hartlebury. That decision has aroused great controversy for the very reason that noble Lord, Lord Inglewood, gave; that is, the commissioners claim that their charity obligations require them to sell it to the highest bidder.

There are numerous other areas of concern, such as inadequate consultation with local interests, the lack of any strategy for dealing with historic assets, of which the Hurd Library is the prime example, and lack of care for the building. I am told that, during the recent cold spell, Hartlebury was heated for only four hours a day and, unsurprisingly, there were numerous burst pipes over Christmas, followed by floods that were unchecked for several days.

On the question of the sale, the commissioners are determined to put the house on the market in April 2012. In my view and that of the members of the Hartlebury Castle Preservation Trust, who are desperately attempting to raise the money—I declare an interest as one of their patrons—it is quite wrong for them to be driven only by a requirement to make the most from a sale that they can, regardless of how inappropriate the use to which any new owners may put the house. Surely it must be possible for this house, and the other see houses to which the noble Lord referred, to remain in public ownership with the running costs met by a body such as a charitable trust or, possibly, the National Trust. Something needs to be done to allow genuine local interests, who have a real vision of what these houses can contribute to the local community, to have their chance to show what they can do. That is why I strongly support the moratorium proposed by the noble Lord on the sale of other assets by the Church Commissioners. I hope that the Minister will agree and maybe, if one of the right reverend Prelates is able to contribute on behalf of the Church Commissioners, they will agree as well.

[Lord Boswell of Aynho]

My Lords, I, too, have appended my name to the amendment. I commend my noble friend Lord Inglewood for the erudition and articulacy of the case that he has put, particularly in relation to the legal arguments, which I am not competent to follow, and on the need for accountability of the Church Commissioners. I do not need to rehearse the arguments at length, but the debate so far has revealed a lacuna in our accountability. I say to the right reverend Prelates who are in their places that, in my experience of dealing with the Church of England and as a loyal Anglican who has dealt with legislation in another place, there is a need to articulate the interests of what might be termed the Bishops’ Bench for shorthand and of the Church Commissioners, because it is not always clear that there is a united voice in these matters. So it has been right to expose the issue of accountability.

The second issue, about which many of us in the House feel strongly, is the need to preserve the heritage. I would not make this specific to the affairs of the Anglican Church but there are a number of people sitting on a number of trusts in different capacities who have heritage assets that may or may not have strayed into their ownership as a result of past arrangements. I am thinking, for example, of a certain involvement that I had with the Coram Foundation and the Foundling Hospital at one stage and the legally intense issues, some time ago, in terms of the disposition of their paintings; or, indeed, Royal Holloway College, at which one of my daughters was a student, and the Turners that it had to sell. There is a real tension and we should reflect on ways in which—rather along the lines of the work that my noble friend Lord Inglewood does in relation to the reviewing of the export of works of art—we can run some of these heritage issues past accountability before it is too late to do so.

I make those two points in the full knowledge—and, indeed, having discussed them with Mr Baldry, the Second Church Estates Commissioner, who used to be my constituency neighbour when I was in another place—that there are real issues for the resourcing of the Church of England. We fully understand that it must make the best use of its assets—it has an important pastoral task, to which I warm—but it must not do so at the expense of these other considerations. That it has a need for the money may be a necessary and appropriate argument, but it is not quite sufficient to justify everything that may have taken place, as described by my noble friends and others. This is an area in which we need to sharpen up and make sure that it is meeting its wider obligations as well as its specific and precise ones to resource the church.