Church Maintenance: Sustainability

3. What proposals the Church of England has to put the maintenance of churches and cathedrals on a sustainable basis.

The Church of England is very grateful for the generosity of congregations and local communities for the upkeep of its buildings, as it is to the Government for the recent £54 million of culture recovery funding, which included £20 million for capital repairs. However, putting repair and maintenance funding on a stable footing is essential if the Church is to continue contributing about £50 billion a year to national wellbeing, as calculated by the Treasury’s Green Book methodology. Past partnerships between Government and the Church have been very helpful in this regard, and with levelling up this opportunity is even greater.

I thank my hon. Friend for that answer. Churches in rural communities face challenges of small and sometimes decreasing congregations, significant upkeep of old buildings, and, often, being in a group of churches under a common minister. These churches are at the heart of our rural communities and play such an important role for the people in those communities. What is the Church doing to support the long-term survival of small rural churches?

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for raising this issue; he is absolutely right to do so. Our rural churches are a precious part of the Church of England, and we are looking at various options for small rural churches that could include, for example, new insurance and maintenance partnerships to remove some of the bureaucracy from priests and churchwardens while, very importantly, retaining local ownership. We are committed to a thriving rural ministry to attract the congregations to be able to sustain these churches into the future.

In my work as a lay canon in the Church of England I have always been impressed by the engagement of local communities with churches in the process of sustainability in terms of caring for the building and caring for the place of the church in the community. Increasingly, we in the Church of England have new plans to make young people more energetic in this regard. Is that not at the heart of sustainability in the Church of England estate?

Sometimes the church is described as 22 people in need of a rest and a crowd in need of exercise. The hon. Gentleman has absolutely put his finger on something important, and I am grateful to him for raising it.