Lord Cormack
Main Page: Lord Cormack (Conservative - Life peer)
Lord Cormack
That this House takes note of the importance of the English parish church.
Lord Cormack (Con)
My Lords, what a wonderful illustration this is of the value of your Lordships’ House. We pass from a Statement on the G7, with all its international implications and ramifications, to come to talk about the English parish church. I am exceptionally grateful to have this opportunity. Almost exactly two years ago I had a similar opportunity to talk about the importance of English cathedrals; so this is mark 2.
It is impossible to drive anywhere in my native county of Lincolnshire without being conscious of the centrality of the parish church in all the many communities of that large county. I could spend my 15 minutes—if I chose to, but I shall not—talking just about Lincolnshire’s parish churches, which are some of the greatest in the land. One thinks of: the magisterial spire of Louth, second only in height and equal in glory to that of Salisbury; the incredible Saxon-Norman minster church at Stow, in the tiniest of hamlets; or the most magisterial tower of any parish church in England at Boston—a landmark to seafarers for centuries. Then there are the tiny churches: Langton by Spilsby, a Georgian gem where Dr Johnson was a regular visitor to his friend Bennet Langton; Snarford, with its Westminster Abbey-quality memorials to the St Paul family; and many more.
My passion for churches began in my native county at the little church of Clee, once a tiny village between Grimsby and Cleethorpes that has now been swallowed up. The church, with its Saxon tower and its Norman nave, contains a tablet on one of the pillars in the nave recording the dedication by St Hugh of Lincoln in the reign of Richard I. That is where it all began for me, but when I came to another place almost exactly 44 years ago, the first campaign that I sought to lead was to get state aid for our parish churches. The first Private Member’s Bill that I introduced had the same objective. In my first book, Heritage in Danger, which I wrote way back in 1976, the future of the parish church loomed large. This issue has engaged me for a long time. I suppose that I ought to declare—although I have no pecuniary interest—that for more than 40 years I have been successively trustee and vice-president of what is now called the National Churches Trust. For 15 years, I was president of the Staffordshire Churches Trust; and for 30 years, I have been trustee or vice-president of the Lincolnshire Churches Trust.
Why? It is because I believe that it is in the parish churches of our land that we come closest to the soul and history of each community that the individual church serves. You can trace the ups and downs of the community economically by the extensions and reductions in size to churches. You can follow the history of the worthies of that community by studying their monuments and memorials. Even in this secular age, everyone who lives in England is a parishioner, lives in a parish, is entitled to the ministrations of the Church of England—whatever his or her race, creed or colour—and can enter the only public buildings that are always open and welcoming to people. Every single one of our fellow citizens has this inalienable right. They are buildings that speak of their communities, to their communities, for their communities. In almost every case, they remain the most prominent public buildings. They are not just places of worship, although that is their prime purpose and concern. They are places where the community can come together. They are places where concerts can be held. They are the focal point. In almost every village and small town in England, the parish church is the most prominent building.
Some people might say, “Why just concentrate on the parish churches? Are there not many more important religious buildings?”. Of course there are. Some who will take part in this debate have a particular interest in those. All the trusts with which I am involved give grants to all religious buildings, be they Roman Catholic churches, Quaker meeting houses or Methodist chapels. The real problem facing those who care about these things, however, rests with the Anglican churches because the Church of England has some 16,000 for which it is responsible—12,500 of which are listed buildings; 45% of grade 1 listed buildings in this country are church buildings, most of which are parish churches.
All this comes at a cost that is not primarily borne by the state, even though that campaign to which I referred was successful. It was a marvellous illustration of the fact that this issue crosses party boundaries that it was a Conservative Government who made the decision that state aid should be available but a Labour Government in 1974-75 who implemented it. We are also grateful to successive Governments, particularly to Gordon Brown when, as Chancellor the Exchequer, he gave a special grant to offset the fact that repairs to listed buildings, wrongly in my view, are eligible for VAT. Nevertheless, as long ago as 2004, English Heritage estimated that maintaining our parish churches cost £175 million a year, of which the churches themselves produced £115 million. I would hate to move towards the French system, whereby the fabric of all religious buildings is vested in the state. If you go to France you do not find that local patriotism and passionate concern, shared by believers and non-believers alike, for their parish church. When, however, that is considered in the context of wind farms or what we are planning with HS2, the amount of money that we are talking about to safeguard our parish churches is a very tiny sum indeed. We have to bear in mind that our churches and cathedrals are the most visited buildings in our country and are worth £350 million a year to the tourism economy—something to which your Lordships will be turning attention in the next debate.
There are always problems with buildings that are old, fragile and vulnerable. One has to guard against lead theft, vandalism and all things. I want, however, to talk briefly about a particular menace to many old churches, the menace of the bat. I became acutely conscious of this when I visited the wonderful collegiate church of Tattershall in Lincolnshire last summer, which has some of the most remarkable 15th-century brasses in the country. They are all being corroded by bat droppings. In many churches in our land the bat is a terrible problem. I shall quote from a letter that I received only this morning from the Church of England Parliamentary Unit:
“Where there are large colonies it can become intolerable. Churches were built for the worship of God by people. They were not built as nature reserves. The smell, the mess which has to be cleared up puts an intolerable burden on parishes, and in some cases is making the buildings unusable. We have heard of one instance where the vicar has to shake bat faeces out of her hair while celebrating communion at the altar … The impression is that the bats matter much more than the worshipping community—and this is exacerbated by the fact that Natural England have abrogated responsibility … to the Bat Conservation Trust, who are quite legitimately a pressure group”.
I also quote from an article in Ecclesiology Today by Dr Sally Badham, who says:
“Of course it is important that our native species should be protected, but I firmly believe that a much more realistic balance needs to be struck between bats’ needs and the protection of our national heritage and the health of people visiting and attending churches … We must wake up to the fact that we just cannot afford for our historic churches to be turned into bat barns”.
This is a subject that is not sufficiently aired, but it really is a very true danger. If this debate achieved only one thing—a better balance between the demands of English nature and the needs of the English heritage—I would be well content.
I hope other things will come from the debate too. I hope the Government—the Minister will respond to this—will recognise that targeted grants to anticipate problems, aimed at clearing gutters and repairing roofs, would be greatly helpful. I would like to see a special national heritage memorial fund to devote resources to church memorials and monuments. What more appropriate time to do that than when we are commemorating the centenary of the first Great War and approaching the 70th anniversary of the end of the Second World War? I would also like to see more young people encouraged not just to go to church services—that is the job of the church—but to recognise their intrinsic architectural and historical importance. These buildings are part of the warp and weft of our civilisation.
As a result of the debate I had two years ago, a campaign was mounted. In that debate I called for £50 million for cathedrals. It did not succeed, but this year in the Budget we got £20 million from the Chancellor. Of course he cannot open a purse at the Dispatch Box, but I hope when the Minister comes to reply he will promise to talk to ministerial colleagues about how a little really does go a long way in this context.
One of the enduring sounds of the English countryside and the English townscape is the bells of our churches. We have a unique tradition of campanology in this country. I was talking only yesterday to the noble Baroness, Lady Cox, who encouraged me to talk about this briefly, saying how wonderful it would be if more young people took up what is the mathematical art of bell-ringing. If the bells could ring out from the parish churches of England, acknowledging the fact that your Lordships’ House had devoted some time to their future and that a Government had been generous in recognising their problems, I would be delighted indeed. The bells ringing out might even have the additional advantage of driving the bats out of the belfry.
Lord Cormack
My Lords, I am exceptionally grateful to my noble friend the Minister for his extremely generous and wide-ranging response. I hope that he will allow me to come and see him to talk a little more about the bats because it is a very serious problem, particularly in rural areas, that we need to get a grip on and get the balance right.
I thank all noble Lords from all parts of the House who spoke. They made telling contributions, many of them passionate and some extremely moving. What united everybody who spoke in this debate is the recognition of the unifying force of the parish church, its evolving place within a changing community and how, all over the country, these buildings provide a focus and a purpose for the communities they serve. I have had the privilege of being a church warden of three different churches—one in a quite large village, one in a small village and St Margaret’s, Westminster—for a total of 35 years. I fully appreciate what we can and should do. We can never completely exploit the infinite possibilities that these great buildings bring to our society.
This has been a useful debate. I said at the beginning that we were going from the great international affairs covered by the G7 Statement to something much more truly parochial. We had contributions from all parts of the House that proved to me that the single Peer who said, “Oh, why do you want a debate about that?”, did not in fact speak for those here today. I thank all noble Lords for taking part and for recognising something that is to me of incalculable importance. I again thank the Minister.