Ecclesiastical Fees (Amendment) Measure

Lord Newby Excerpts

Wednesday 23rd March 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Laming]

My Lords, I also thank the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Exeter for so expertly setting out the contents of these three Measures. The Measures referring to the care of cathedrals and the ecclesiastical fees might well be described as tidying-up pieces of legislation, but that in no way should detract from their importance. The way in which these items, which are most timely, have been handled—not only through Synod, which has been extremely thorough and careful over its deliberations, but also, if I may say, through the Ecclesiastical Committee—gives me confidence to commend these three Measures to the House.

[Lord Newby]

I begin by associating myself with the remarks of the noble Lord, Lord Laming, about the immense amount of work that has been done to get the Measures tabled, and congratulate the right reverend Prelate on his introduction of them.

The Measures do not deal with the level of fees. They state how they are to be set—there is a great infrastructure for that—but there is a big issue about how we should set the fee. When I raised that question in the Ecclesiastical Committee, the response was that, at the moment, if anyone asked the church to justify the figures in terms of actual costs, it would be hard put to do so. An attempt was to be made to work up a realistic estimate of the cost of providing authorised ministry buildings, and so forth.

If I may say so, that will require the judgment of Solomon. First, the amount of authorised ministry—I declare an interest as a clergy spouse—varies so enormously from case to case. Certainly with funerals, the amount of time that can be taken where there has been a tragic death in the family is phenomenal, and is one of the most important things that the clergy do. That is extremely difficult.

I also hope that, without wanting to ramp the fees up, the committee or sub-committee that looks into it will not just look at the marginal costs. Going back to the point about cathedrals, you cannot have a wedding in a church unless the church has been kept up for the years before the wedding. Simply charging for so many hours of the clergywoman's time plus a bit of heating costs and whatever does not get to the bottom of the real value.

I also had a slightly mischievous thought when the right reverend Prelate was talking about a national table of fees. Some churches are extremely sought after, particularly for weddings. It is not because the population of the parish is particularly devout. It occurred to me that without necessarily adopting the Ryanair approach to pricing for churches, there is a different quality between a wedding conducted in a country church in July and in an inner-city church in January. I wonder whether it might be possible to contemplate seasonal variation.

[Lord Cormack]

What if it rains on the day?

[Lord Newby]

We might need to have a rebate in the event of rain. Some people get married in a particular kind of church at a particular time of year purely because they are paying for a better facility. In these harsh economic times, the church ought at least to explore that possibility.

[Lord Bates]

Having read the Measures, I was intrigued particularly by Parts 6 and 7 and wanted to question a little further. My prompt for asking this question was a walk on Saturday through my home town of Gateshead. I walked past about six different church buildings with my father. As we were walking, we were estimating the congregations in each of those six different church buildings, which happened to include two Anglican, a Baptist, a Salvation Army and a Methodist church. We estimated that the congregations in the six buildings were in the region of 150 or 200 for all of them.

As this is a consolidation measure, which deals in Part 6 with the use of places of worship, one wonders about underutilisation of church buildings and how that could be addressed. When he comes to respond to this short debate, perhaps the right reverend Prelate can comment on what consideration is given to better use of existing buildings, because there are a lot of opportunities there.

That links with Part 7, which has some excellent language which talks about local ecumenical partnerships working with different denominations in pursuit of, in that quaint phrase, the cure of souls, in the local area. That provision within the mission in Part 7, if replicated in the building regulations in Part 6, could lead to some interesting collaborations which would be for the benefit of communities. There are now many ways in which those buildings could be used. They could be used for schools, going back to their original purpose. Why could not the church building be used for them? They could be used for housing.