Public Bodies Bill [HL]

Lord Foster of Bishop Auckland Excerpts

Monday 7th March 2011 Lords Chamber

Given its maintenance of so many special buildings, the church is the nation’s leading heritage organisation. However, the commissioners are not primarily a heritage body; they are trustees of the church’s historic assets and they are required to optimise their benefit for the church of today and tomorrow. The commissioners are a registered charity with a clear, specific legal responsibility to support the ministry of the Church of England and they have clear, robust governance structures. There could, if we are not careful, be a collision of governance if this amendment is passed. At this hour we should resist the temptation for Parliament to take back powers that it has given to the church, and concentrate instead on using more effectively the perfectly proper and long-standing means of holding the Church Commissioners to account.

[Lord Foster of Bishop Auckland]

My Lords, I support the amendment and I am very grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Inglewood, for the time that he has given to researching the legalities. I am not qualified either to support or to challenge these but I am most grateful to him. I am grateful, too, that he mentioned the Zurbaráns. My noble colleague pronounces it differently —I think a member of the Royal Family would agree with him—but, none the less, I call them Zurbaráns.

I have a great regard for the Church Commissioners. I would not agree with all the remarks made by my noble friend. I have had the great pleasure of serving with four Bishops of Durham, all of whom lived in Auckland Castle, which was part of my constituency for 26 years. It was a great joy to work with each of them. Indeed, I was a trustee of Auckland Castle for more than a decade and gave a great deal of my time to trying to reduce its financial burden on the Church Commissioners. We had considerable success during that period, before the trust was disbanded only last year.

The reason I support the amendment is that we are not arguing against the fiduciary responsibilities of the Church Commissioners, but we believe that they should also have a responsibility to pay due regard to national, local and regional heritage. After all, King John stayed at Auckland Castle in 1203, so I gather. The bishops of Durham were always prince bishops. Indeed, the county of Durham described itself as the land of the prince bishops. They were very powerful people indeed in those days and colossal figures in the whole political, social and economic life within the county of Durham and the wider authority.

I have been discussing this matter with the Church Commissioners for 15 years. On three occasions they have sought to sell the castle and the paintings, and on three occasions we have managed to dissuade them from doing so. On the last occasion, the campaign was ably led by bishop Tom Wright with the support of the Bishop of London, to whom the right reverend Prelate referred, and ultimately with the support of the Church Commissioners. I am very grateful to him for what he said and for the spirit in which he said it.

The commissioners have not always taken the same view. There was a period 15 years ago when they wanted to sell off all the bishops’ palaces as quickly as they could, but I think that reflected the position of a single commissioner. They departed from that view and have taken a much more sensible view over about the past decade. Now they are in discussion with Durham County Council and the group chaired by the Lord Lieutenant of Durham, of which I am a member. We are very pleased to be discussing this matter with the Church Commissioners.

However, it would be enormously helpful if the Church Commissioners had a duty to pay due regard to national and local heritage. After all, the Zurbaráns have been there for 250 years. They were bought for £150 by the bishop to celebrate the changing of the law in this place to extend the civil and political liberties of the Jews. What a wonderful thing he did 250 years ago. In the north of England we celebrate the great fact that we had such a progressive bishop, and we have had several since then. The bishop wanted to celebrate this deeply unpopular step among society at large by buying the Zurbarán paintings and extending the long dining room of the castle in order to hang them there. They have hung there ever since. We are enormously proud locally of the castle and of the Zurbaráns. The commissioners need to take all that into consideration.

I am still hopeful that we can come to a sensible conclusion on this issue. I am very grateful to the noble Lord for giving me the opportunity to speak in support of the amendment.

[Lord Deben]

My Lords, I shall not keep your Lordships' House long but I want to make a further point. The Church of England is in a very real sense the guardian of the nation’s ecclesiastical treasures. It received them in circumstances which would be inconceivable today. We all have an interest in this. For many years I sat on the Ecclesiastical Committee as an Anglican and then as a Catholic. That change was perfectly reasonable because the Ecclesiastical Committee of the two Houses is there to ensure that decisions made perfectly properly by the Church of England do not detract from the interests of Her Majesty’s subjects as a whole.

The problem with the argument put forward by the right reverend Prelate is that it seeks to suggest that the Church of England is not the Church of England but a sect that is able to use its resources for its particular interests at a particular time. I warn the right reverend Prelate that his argument is very dangerous because his presence in this House is earnest of the fact that the Church of England is not thought by our society to be merely a sect. I have to admit that I left the Church of England because I believed that by making choices of a theological kind, it had changed—