Places of Worship: Protective Security Funding

Lord Scriven Excerpts

Tuesday 7th May 2019 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Williams of Trafford]

The noble Lord precisely lays out some of the training being done and that will be offered over the next three years. It is not just putting CCTV on buildings. He is absolutely right that intelligence is vital and that in the Church of England, the Muslim community and the Jewish community, which all rely on volunteers—some of their institutions would close without them—those volunteers should be trained and safeguarding measures should be put in place.

[Lord Scriven (LD)]

My Lords, can I come back to the point that my noble friend Lady Hamwee made regarding the bureaucratic nature of the application process? If you are local, whether somewhere is hidden or not you will know about it. Whether it is in a conservation area is irrelevant; it is that particular conservation area, for example, which will determine what will need to be put up and whether it will be granted by the planning authorities. It is not national. I therefore ask the Minister in a spirit of friendliness to go away and look at this, because it is bureaucratic. Can she look at making it a little more light touch, and work out which questions are needed centrally and which are local?

[Baroness Williams of Trafford]

I was trying to be helpful to the noble Baroness but the noble Lord makes a perfectly reasonable point. The funding has taken slightly longer to come on-stream than we anticipated for precisely that reason. We wanted to cut down on some of the bureaucracy that holds people back from making these applications, so that point is well made.