Inter Faith Network for the UK

Seema Malhotra Excerpts

Wednesday 10th January 2024 Commons Chamber

[Holly Lynch]

I am really grateful to my hon. Friend for that intervention. She is absolutely right, and I join her in paying tribute to Hounslow Friends of Faith. She has shared a really powerful example of where faith communities can work together to deliver truly beneficial projects and initiatives that go deep into communities, perhaps in ways that other statutory agencies cannot.

[Seema Malhotra (Feltham and Heston) (Lab/Co-op)]

I thank my hon. Friend for allowing me to follow the intervention made by my hon. Friend the Member for Brentford and Isleworth (Ruth Cadbury). In the letter I wrote to the Secretary of State on the funding issue in May last year, I made the point that for almost four decades the Inter Faith Network for the UK has been dedicated to increasing understanding and co-operation between peoples of different faiths.

Does my hon. Friend agree with Charanjit Singh, chair of Hounslow Friends of Faith—making such a contribution at times of tension when dialogue is most needed, as has been outlined—that we need the Inter Faith Network to be supported, so that the national body can make sure that local organisations can do their vital grassroots work?

[Holly Lynch]

I am once again grateful to my hon. Friend. She has made a really powerful case for the support that the national network provides to those local community groups, which then facilitate and host the dialogue that is not always easy, but is absolutely vital. We are all so grateful for the role and the benefit it then has within our communities, and how it brings people together at times when we most need that really important work to be undertaken. She is absolutely right.

The IFN’s member bodies include national faith community representative bodies from the Buddhist, Christian, Hindu, Jewish, Muslim and Sikh faiths, such as the Board of Deputies of British Jews, Hindu Council UK, the Muslim Council of Britain and the Methodist Council, to name just a handful.

--- Later in debate ---

[Simon Hoare]

Let me assure the hon. Lady that I hear precisely what she has said. I will communicate that through to ministerial colleagues and to officials in the Department who are dealing with this matter. She makes the point powerfully and I hear what she says. Any organisation that secures funding from the public sector, be it in central or local government, always values certainty and security. I am seized of that and of the time pressures to which she alludes.

[Seema Malhotra]

Could the Minister confirm whether the Department has also been in touch with the IFN to say that there is going to be a forthcoming announcement?

[Simon Hoare]

The letter of 7 July set out to Dr Crabtree the funding criteria. That letter has not been either rescinded or updated, so it stands as the de facto communication, if you will, between the Department and the network. Officials and Ministers will be working on that, as I say, and the Department hopes to be able to make an announcement in pretty short order.