Chancel Repairs

Lord Cashman Excerpts

Thursday 15th January 2015 Grand Committee

[Lord Cashman (Lab)]

I, too, congratulate the noble Lord on enabling this important debate on an issue which should have been settled years ago but that I hope will be settled soon. I know that I am not alone in having received supportive calls for the repeal, or at least the reform, of this liability from, among others, the Law Society of England and Wales and the National Secular Society. The Law Society is calling for reform of chancel repair liability for a number of reasons, but primarily to reduce the financial burden on purchasers of land and speed up the conveyancing process. It also puts the case that, more widely, reform could help to improve the UK’s standing in the World Bank rankings of ease of doing business. Interestingly, in the section on registering property, we are currently ranked 68th, against an overall ranking of eighth. Much more, clearly, needs to be done.

More widely, the number of property titles blighted by CRL per parish ranges from as few as one to hundreds or even thousands. Where it is a small number, the people singled out will feel doubly vulnerable because of the several nature of CRL—that, in many cases, any one landowner can be sued for the entirety of the repairs needed, as happened in the previously-cited case of Aston Cantlow. Where the number of CRL registrations in a parish is large, untold distress is caused to a significant proportion of the community, including many without the knowledge or resources to cope with it.

In Lytham St Annes, more than 6,000 titles were reportedly registered by the church, the largest number in the country. I believe that the parish with the second largest number of registrations, approaching 1,000, is Gorleston on the Suffolk coast, a town I know well. It is a town with a high proportion of elderly residents, and not a wealthy one; 20% of people are on benefits, compared with 13% for England as a whole. With so many properties sharing the CRL burden, the individual sums recoverable would, one could argue, have hardly been worth collecting or registering, but much as in Lytham, the church in Gorleston gave the impression that the registrations were made just to follow orders, or as the vicar said, “in order to comply with the requirements of the Charity Commission placed on the trustees of charitable organisations”.

The tale goes on. The vicar offered property owners a way out: pay the parish £50 and receive what he described as a “certificate of exemption”. He promoted this as being cheaper than insurance. The recognised way, of course, of buying out CRL is through the Ecclesiastical Dilapidations Measure 1923, under which the money goes to the diocese. These exemption proceeds went to the parish, and an acknowledged expert on CRL has seriously challenged the exemption’s validity. The vicar, too, seems to have had second thoughts, for he has refunded the £50 contributions, which he had said were better than insurance, seemingly whether or not the property owners wanted to lose the exemption they assumed that they had contractually secured. The parish has, it seems, thrown in the towel. I quote this as an example of damage done to the many. It has thrown in the towel because every registration has been revoked, but only after about a year of heartache and uncertainty for those whose properties were registered.

Although I imagine that some owners may reasonably assume that the Church’s right to sue for CRL is thereby removed, the PCC remains free at any time in future to reregister or, more importantly, to sue for it. I hope that I have put the case not only for reform but for repeal. I believe sincerely that CRL is a pernicious, medieval relic and the time is long past for the curtain to be dropped rather heavily upon it.