Public Bodies Bill [HL]

Debate between Lord Inglewood and Lord Taylor of Holbeach

Monday 7th March 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Taylor of Holbeach]

My Lords, I have enjoyed listening to the debate, but I share some of the noble Baroness’s observations on it. Perhaps it is the lateness of the hour. There is scarcely enough time to consider a topic as significant as this. I think I would have enjoyed the debate more if it had not been in the Public Bodies Bill, but it is clearly not an appropriate topic for this Bill, so I am going to address my remarks purely on those grounds. I think the House may well discuss methods whereby the scrutiny of church affairs could be brought back to this House in some way, but that is a matter for the House authorities. It is certainly not a matter for the Public Bodies Bill.

There are three reasons why the Government cannot accept this amendment, and they have been said. The first is that the Church Commissioners fall outside the scope of the Bill. They are not a non-departmental public body but essentially a non-governmental body and a charity under the scrutiny of the Charity Commissioners.

The second reason is the historic relationship between Parliament, government and the Church of England—perhaps we have seen why this separation of the estates is so important in the nature of the debate that we have had this evening. Since the enabling Act 1919 set up the Church Assembly, now the General Synod, it has been accepted that Parliament does not in practice legislate on the internal affairs of the Church of England without its consent. The mechanism laid down in that Act for legislating on the Church of England included the constitution of the Church Commissioners through synodical measure. There are, of course, methods by which Parliament can put pressure on the church to act, but the noble Lord’s amendment seeks to return to a position in which Ministers would have a direct power to intervene in the governance of the commissioners.

The third reason is that the commissioners’ board of governors, of which the right reverend Prelate is chairman, as trustees of a charity, are under a fiduciary duty to manage their assets in the way that best enables them to achieve their charitable purposes. It is therefore for them to determine how best to do so, including by deciding whether to dispose of particular assets. It is not a matter for Ministers to regulate in the case of this or any other charity. I therefore urge the noble Lord to withdraw his amendment.

[Lord Inglewood]

My Lords, I thank all noble Lords who have taken part in this debate. I must say that when I moved the amendment I had no idea what direction the debate would take, but I did not anticipate that it would move in the way in which it did. I particularly thank the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Leicester for arguing the case that he did in the way in which he did, and I thank my noble friend Lord Deben for his counter point. In a way, it drew a lot of the argument into the open and made it clear that these issues are perhaps not as clear as we all like to think they are at first blush. The right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Chester asked me whether I would withdraw the use of the words “money laundering”. I shall do so, although what I actually said was “a form of money laundering”, and I bracket those words with “the philosopher’s stone that turns base metal into gold”.

I will make one technical point and then one more general point. The technical point is that the Church Commissioners are not completely charitable. The point of the 1943 measure is that they hold certain funds that include the bishops’ palaces, which are not held charitably—and I base that not on my own inadequate legal knowledge but on Halsbury’s Laws of England in the Library of the House. The relationship between the Charity Commissioners, the Church of England and its assets is perhaps not as straightforward as any of us quite think.

I will also make a point that no one else has made this evening but which I feel has something to do with this. In religious matters, enthusiasms gain prominence from time to time—we have seen this in a number of areas, such as the Reformation and the iconoclasm of Byzantium—in which so enthusiastic do people become about a particular way of looking at things that they perhaps feel that they can ignore everything else in the pursuit of it. My sense as an individual, as one of the foot-soldiers in the Church of England, is that there is currently a great movement against the kind of things that I was talking about. I hasten to add that I hope your Lordships noticed that I never said that bishops should live in bishops’ palaces; I said that if bishops ceased to live in bishops’ palaces, proper and legitimate steps should be taken to look after the heritage interest that they represent. I added in parenthesis that I had a personal preference in that direction, but that is quite different. I am concerned that, if we have a kind of cultural revolution, as we have seen from time to time in churches, the Red Guards should not destroy all the things that matter in effecting the changes that they want to see.

It is ultimately for the Church of England to decide what it wants to do but I believe that we all have a legitimate interest in the assets of the Church of England and that society as a whole has a legitimate interest in what happens to them. After all, these particular buildings are listed and the civil authority is not simply decoupled from them.

It is late. We have had a lot to think about, and I hope that we shall continue to think about it. I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.