Local Government and Faith Communities

Tony Baldry Excerpts

Tuesday 2nd July 2013 Westminster Hall

[Andrea Leadsom]

Yes. The hon. Gentleman is, of course, quite right that CAP and other faith-based groups work right across the United Kingdom, and they help people from all backgrounds—people of faith and people of no faith. Absolutely no distinction is made between people; everyone benefits from the services. However, the reason that such groups are set up is because people of faith want to help the needy. He specifically mentioned food banks, which do a superb job across the country, and many of them are led and supported by people of faith.

A charity closer to home that I fully support, and of which my husband is a trustee, is the Northampton Hope Centre. It was set up in 1974 by a Christian gentleman who handed out food to rough sleepers—food that he had paid for himself. As more volunteers began to help him, the borough council began to provide small grants to help to pay for the food. By 1984, there were 30 volunteers—mainly Christians—and a daily food service for rough sleepers was provided all year round. In 2006, the charity officially took the name of the Hope Centre to reflect its broader range of support and services, which now included providing training and activities alongside food, showers and clothing. In 2008, the Northampton Hope Centre won the Queen’s golden jubilee award for voluntary services to the community.

Today, the Hope Centre helps those suffering from drug or alcohol addiction, mental illness, crippling debt and family disintegration. It offers a wide range of support, including food, clothing, showers, shelter, social activities, therapeutic workshops and skills development. It aims to encourage its users to recover their independence. Each user’s journey is individual and the Hope Centre aims to support each person at their own pace while creating or finding pathways for people who have all but given up hope of a better future.

The centre’s budget this year is in the region of £400,000, of which only £15,000 will come from public funding. If any Members are around this Friday and find themselves with a spare hour in Northampton, I urge them to pop down to the Hope Centre, where Terry Waite will launch the new “hope café”. One of Northampton’s most exciting initiatives in recent years is the establishment of a street pastor service, which puts compassionate people of faith in the town centre on Friday and Saturday nights, offering practical help to often vulnerable people. I blogged about this in 2006, under the heading “Flip-flops and lollipops”, because, as it was described to me, the street pastors would go out and help young people who were often extraordinarily drunk, providing lollipops to the young men, who would rather suck a lollipop than get in a fight, and flip-flops to the young women, who often lost their high heels on their first steps on the journey of inebriation. It is a practical service that offers sound support and counselling.

[Sir Tony Baldry (Banbury) (Con)]

Does my hon. Friend agree that no greater love can a parliamentary colleague have than to spend a Saturday night/Sunday morning with my hon. Friends the Members for Wellingborough (Mr Bone) and for Kettering (Mr Hollobone) and their street pastors, as I did a couple of Saturdays ago? The street pastors provide a fantastic service in those towns. They are the only people around, other than the police and the ambulance service, actually caring for people. Large numbers of volunteers provide a fantastic service.

[Andrea Leadsom]

I agree with my hon. Friend, who makes a good point. It is right to pay tribute to the street pastors, who form a valuable support group for the police on a Saturday night when, too often, trouble in our streets is common.

I set up a project in 2006 with Richard Johnson, a Christian, who runs a fantastic youth centre in Uganda. He and I set up links between Northamptonshire and Ugandan schools and now each year groups of students from Northamptonshire travel to Uganda for a conference with Ugandan students. They spend their week based at the Discovery Centre in Jinja, Uganda. That has been an astonishing success, building new friendships between teachers and pupils across the miles, and new opportunities for the schools in both countries to take part in a huge range of different cultural activities.

All faith groups, whether they are Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, Sikh, or any other, set great store by their support for their communities. It is important that we in Parliament ensure that their voices are heard. Over the years, over-sensitivity to cultural issues and a growing, muscular secularism has meant that the amazing work done by people of faith, often for the most vulnerable, goes unnoticed. Of course, people of faith are not doing this in return for gratitude or recognition, but we should make space in public life for those of faith.

I support many of the report’s recommendations and call for three specific things. First, I should like local authorities deliberately to work more closely with faith groups, taking advantage of the support they bring to local communities, to attempt to simplify processes and jargon, and share best practice between local authorities. Secondly, I should like local authorities to look from a plural rather than a secular perspective at the services faith groups offer in their communities. The leader of Churches Together in Northampton, Ted Hale, tells me that he and many others work for non-Christian organisations such as Arthritis Care and Age UK, and so on. It is often people of faith who run such organisations.

--- Later in debate ---

[Sir Tony Baldry (Banbury) (Con)]

I am wholeheartedly grateful to my hon. Friend the Member for South Northamptonshire (Andrea Leadsom) for introducing this debate. I endorse everything said by her and by the right hon. Member for East Ham (Stephen Timms)—I can confidently reassure him that this Government do not treat people of faith as oddities, minorities or foreigners.

Perhaps a couple of days after I was appointed Second Church Estates Commissioner—it was on one of my first visits to Lambeth palace, so it must have been very early in the life of this Parliament and the coalition Government—one of the first visitors through the door was the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government. Lambeth palace has big doors, and the Secretary of State was the first through them for a gathering with the Archbishop of Canterbury and other faith leaders.

At the outset, my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State made it clear to the Archbishop of Canterbury, other faith leaders and people such as myself that he and the Government wanted to work with faith communities. He reinforced the Near Neighbours programme, which has done excellent work in Leicester, Bradford, parts of Birmingham and east London, in and near the constituency of the right hon. Member for East Ham. Throughout, the Secretary of State made it clear that he took a practical and pragmatic approach to central and local government working with faith groups.

I appreciate that others wish to speak in this debate, so I shall be brief. However, as this is a debate about Christian action, I hope that hon. Members will excuse me if I make a slightly theological point. There is no way for the state, either centrally or locally, to deliver every human service. The state cannot deliver compassion, comfort the bereaved or relieve people of their loneliness. As it happens, I have hanging in my sitting room at home one of those illuminated Biblical addresses, although it is rather more an instruction than an address, which is from chapter 25 of St Matthew. Jesus is asked:

“Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you drink? When did we see you a stranger and make you welcome, naked and clothe you, sick or in prison and go to seek you?”

Jesus does not reply to the Roman authorities or the Jewish state; he replies entirely to us as individuals:

“Then shall he answer them, saying, ‘Truly I say to you, in so much as you did it not to one of the least of these, you did it not to me.’ And these shall go away into everlasting punishment, and the righteous into life eternal.”

The New Living Translation puts it another way:

“And he will answer, ‘I tell you the truth, when you refused to help the least of these my brothers and sisters, you were refusing to help me.’”

When Jesus was asked, “How do you help those who are thirsty, hungry or in prison?” he said not, “This is the responsibility of the state,” but, “This is the responsibility of you as Christians and as human individuals.” That is a fundamental acknowledgment that we must get our minds around. We, as Christians or as human beings, cannot simply shift all responsibilities on to the state, because the state does not have the capacity to give that human compassion and do all the other things. The state can help to support hospices for the dying, but it is the hundreds of volunteers who help to run hospices who make all the difference.

[David Simpson (Upper Bann) (DUP)]

I agree with the hon. Gentleman’s sentiments. A number of weeks ago, I took part with street pastors in some of their outreach work. I witnessed the compassion that he mentioned from young people of the Christian faith who were doing fantastic work among drug addicts and alcoholics. Such work has transformed lives, and our young people have a lot to contribute to that.

[Sir Tony Baldry]

I am grateful for that intervention.

My hon. Friend the Member for Gainsborough (Sir Edward Leigh) made some observations on behalf of the Roman Catholic Church, so I hope that hon. Members will excuse me if I make a couple of observations on behalf of the Church of England. The Church of England is, of course, a national church. The whole point of the Church of England is that it divides the whole of England into parishes, and every parish has a priest who is responsible for that parish. Archbishop Temple once observed that the Church of England was one of very few organisations that existed for the benefit of people other than its own members. The Church has a mission to the whole community. It must be, and is, a national Church.

Recent research by the Church Urban Fund found that thousands of parish churches throughout the country play an active role in their local communities by running lunch clubs for the elderly and after-school clubs for children in deprived areas, and helping to run food banks, as the right hon. Member for East Ham observed. In fact, some 6,500 parishes in England run organised activities to address at least one social need in the community.

What was interesting about the Church Urban Fund’s research findings was that parishes based on council estates and in inner cities were the most likely to be active in the community. Some 80% of Church of England parishes on council estates run activities to address at least one social need. In my experience, they do so with other faith groups. The street pastors, food banks and other initiatives that I have seen involve faith groups working together, and I do not think that there is any problem with that.

Every day, throughout the country, thousands of faith-based volunteers quietly go about helping the elderly, isolated people and toddler groups, or doing more difficult work in drug rehabilitation programmes. In Oxfordshire, we have a programme that meets people who have been released from prison—literally at the prison gate—to give them support as they return to the community. In hundreds of different ways, such work is done patiently and tirelessly every day.

During my time as a Second Church Estates Commissioner who takes a particular interest in this issue, I have not come across any instances of faith groups or churches saying to me that they feel frustrated or thwarted because local government has not understood them. The idea of a covenant, as proposed by the right hon. Member for East Ham, is extremely interesting and probably well worth pursuing, but I would hope—and I see this throughout the country—for partnerships between faith groups, and local government and other organisations. When I recently went to Wellingborough and Kettering to see street pastors at work, what impressed me was that at the beginning of the evening, senior police officers came in to brief them about what was happening in the community that night, how things were in the town and what they expected. Those street pastors had the full support and respect of the local police and the local authority, which was much appreciated. Whether helping to tackle isolation, family breakdown, debt or homelessness, or supporting people on low incomes, or with mental health or drug and alcohol abuse problems, people of faith are present. I would hope that central and local government will continue to work out how to maximise that synergy.

Occasionally, reality breaks out in the Palace of Westminster, and one reality that has broken out in the past couple of weeks is that the welfare budget is not going to grow exponentially. Members on both sides of the House, including the shadow Chancellor, have acknowledged that, so we will all have to be smarter, cleverer and wiser about how we work within the parameters of the existing welfare budget, which is huge. The House of Commons Library tells me that the total spent on welfare is forecast to be £204.1 billion this financial year. In 2016-17, that will rise to £218.2 billion in cash terms, or £206.9 billion at this year’s prices, so we will go from £204 billion to approximately £207 billion in three years’ time, and we will all have to work within that budget. Given the opportunity, faith groups have the capacity and ability to do much with central and local government.