My Lords, I am delighted to follow the right reverend Prelate and the noble Lord, Lord Best. I agree with everything they said. I begin with an apology to the Committee; I have not played the part in debates on this Bill that I would like to have done because I have been caring for a wife recovering from an operation and have not been able to be present late into the night. I am grateful that things came to a halt in the Chamber on Monday, which enabled us to be here today.
I declare an interest in that I have been a church warden of three churches for a total of 36 years, in each of which I had to be in charge of or strongly supporting an appeal. I remember being church warden in the early 1970s in the village of Brewood in Staffordshire, when we suddenly discovered dry rot. We had to raise some £40,000 very quickly, and we did it. When I was church warden at St Margaret’s, Westminster, we had to raise £1 million in the early 1980s, and we did it. At Enville, in Staffordshire, where I was warden for some 16 years, we had to raise something like £250,000, and we did it—but with great difficulty. As one who has been a trustee and then a vice-president of the National Churches Trust for well over 40 years, president of the Staffordshire Historic Churches Trust for some 20 years, and vice-president of the Lincolnshire Churches Trust for a very long time, I speak with a little knowledge and great feeling.
5.15 pm
I want to share a specific example with your Lordships. The benefit from clarifying the law, because the best you can argue is that it is ambiguous, would be enormous in a rural county such as Lincolnshire, which has hundreds of churches—almost as many as in Norfolk. Many of them are grade 1 listed and of enormous
historic importance. Many of them have enormous social importance as well. Next week, I am due to go to see a church I know quite well in the village of Revesby, from where Sir Joseph Banks, one of the greatest sons of Lincolnshire, came. It is not the church that he knew—it was replaced in Victorian times—but the village is a conservation area of great beauty and the church is the one big building where people can gather together. In parish after parish in Lincolnshire, that is the case. As president of the Tennyson Society, I know and love the wonderful churches in Tennyson country: Somersby, Bag Enderby, Harrington. Again, in each of those places, the church, although not large, is the one public building. Everyone uses it for one purpose or another.
The great thing about these amendments is that they would not oblige anyone to do anything but would enable local people—because very often the parochial church council and the parish council are very similar in composition—to help the building that, in most cases, is dearest to their hearts. So I make a real appeal to my noble friend the Minister. The noble Lord, Lord Best, put it so beautifully: it costs nothing; it avoids protracted legal wrangling and filling the pockets of lawyers. They are just enabling amendments to allow local people to help the building that, in many cases, means most to them.
I speak as one who is of the Church of England, of course, but I am very glad that the Catholic bishops have signed up to this, and the Methodists and others, because sometimes it is a Methodist or Roman Catholic hall or church in a suburb or a small urban area that is vital to youth groups or kindergartens. I was passing a church hall in London only the other day that is home to a kindergarten.
All I say to my noble friend is that there are very few things that we debate in your Lordships’ House that would put no cost on government. This is something that enables. I beg my noble friend to accept the spirit of these amendments so that, on Report, we could have something that we can all support, ideally in the Minister’s name.