Community and Voluntary Sector

Lord Griffiths of Burry Port Excerpts

Thursday 31st October 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Griffiths of Burry Port (Lab)]

My Lords, it is a great privilege to speak in a debate of this kind and to thank my noble friend for giving us the opportunity to share experience in this way.

I have spent my entire working life in the voluntary sector and have struggled very hard throughout that time to maintain the balance between administrative roles, management and client-facing co-working with the people one is serving through the voluntary activities in question. That is an immense privilege, as my dear and noble friend Lord Hastings in the corner alluded to—why he sits in the corner, I do not understand. His practical experience is a model for all of us. He has held high office at a number of very significant institutions and yet it is the person-to-person relationship that strikes home whenever one meets him. I would hope that that would be my emphasis too.

I pay tribute to this little man sitting next to me, my noble friend Lord Parekh, whose books I read years ago, whose leadership I enjoyed on visits to South Africa and other places as part of building relationships across international borders, and whose thinking has always been so clear and helpful.

I am unashamedly going to speak about churches today, and have been given encouragement to do so by my noble friend who, from a Jewish perspective, seemed to open the door for that. Years ago in my work, I had responsibility for a day centre for homeless people in Seymore Place, Marylebone, and for halfway houses for young offenders in Wandsworth. The Home Office approved a centre for prisoners on remand, resourced by an astonishing criminologist from the University of Cambridge, and a self-referral place for people fearing that they were dependent upon substance abuse. In that context I have witnessed human suffering at an extraordinary level. In order to catch the picture properly, I remember, for example, sleeping in Lincoln’s Inn Fields or in shop doorways with the homeless as we built relationships that would allow for a conversational approach to the way we handle what we on the giving side too often describe as problems when in fact they are situations that can be entered into and dark places that people can be brought out of simply by having someone else they can trust.

In my cozy retirement in leafy Croydon, and attending church—no longer running the wretched place because it was so complicated in the end—it is wonderful to have the space and the people who bring people from the community together. We help people with mental health problems, we hold art classes and University of the Third Age sessions, we host winter sleeping shelters on rota with other churches in the region, and those of us who do not need our £300 winter fuel allowance put it into a fund so that it can be administered on behalf of those who need it most. In all these ways, such wonderful opportunities occur. I so agree with my noble friend in the corner that what you receive is far more than anything that you give.

The last thing I want to say, although noble Lords will get the sense that I could go on a long time, is that I picked up the Methodist Recorder—who has heard of that?—this morning on my way here. It carries a report from the National Churches Trust that shows how—it has been quantified and worked out by experts—churches save the NHS £8.4 billion per year through the direct and indirect services that they offer to their public. So let us note the decline in numbers who go to church, but glory in the fact that those who do punch above their weight.