Your church needs you

As the cost of repairing 12,000 listed churches rises, Anglican authorities are hoping to use an ancient law that requires nearby homeowners to foot part of the bill

St Michael & all Angels church in Haworth, West Yorkshire, where the Brontës are buried, is undergoing renovation following lead thefts 

All Saints, Waterden, stands in splendid isolation in the middle of a field in a hidden valley 10 miles from the north Norfolk coast. It is a 1,000-year-old Anglo-Saxon village church without a village – but even if it has lost its original purpose, it remains picture postcard perfect, a Grade I-listed gem in a landscape that carries those who happen upon it back through the centuries.

They are few and far between, though, as the visitors’ book records. Certainly not enough to justify having someone on the door to collect ticket money, as happens in most of our great cathedrals and abbeys. Recently, though, All Saints required £50,000 of repairs to its roof and £10,000 to restore its ancient box pews. So who was going to pay?

The building belongs to the parish of South Creake, where the 40 or so regular worshippers have already had to find £100,000 to repair the roof of their own Saint Mary’s. They use All Saints only once every four weeks for Evensong. It is quite a bill to foot in return for 12 services a year.

Their dilemma neatly encapsulates the crisis facing the custodians of the 12,000 listed Anglican parish churches around the country, two thirds of which are in rural areas with tiny and dwindling congregations struggling to pay maintenance bills. The desperation caused by this funding shortfall has been brought into sharp relief this week by the news that thousands of homeowners living near ancient churches potentially face large bills for the upkeep of their fabric, even if they never set foot inside them.

The Anglican authorities are currently writing to parochial church councils to encourage them to register what are called “chancel repair liabilities”. These date back more than 500 years to the Reformation period and the Dissolution of the Monasteries. Those who took over what had been monks’ land took on the responsibility for repairing the chancel (the area around the altar) in the local church. These remain on the statute book, even though they have fallen into abeyance.

People like Andrew and Gail Wallbank. In the early Nineties, they inherited Glebe Farm in Aston Cantlow in Warwickshire. They vaguely knew about the ancient covenant on the property, but thought that at most it meant putting a tenner in the vicar’s collecting bucket when he came round for a sherry before Christmas. Then, in 1994, they received a bill for £100,000 for their share of repairs to the nearby Saint John the Baptist church. They appealed, all the way up to the House of Lords, but lost in December 2008. The law may be an old one, but the obligation remained.

The Wallbanks were forced to sell Glebe Farm to pay. The local diocese of Coventry had a very simple reply. “The parish had to bring this action because they couldn’t get any financial support from any other agency.”

There are, it is estimated, around 5,000 parishes in England that could be covered by chancel repair liabilities (that is roughly half of the Anglican Church’s presence in rural areas). Dioceses are now writing to all parochial church councils to tell them they have a duty to investigate whether such liabilities exist, and if so register them before October 2013 with the Land Registry.

This deadline was set by the 2002 Land Registration Act, influenced in part by the Wallbanks’ case. It requires all such liabilities to be set out in writing and approved by that date, or lost forever once the current owner of the property sells or dies. A recent spate of letters sent out in the Cotswolds village of Broadway has caused local MP Peter Luff to warn of “the tip of an iceberg”.

Others disagree. “Most parishes don’t even have title deeds,” says Malcolm Fisher, company secretary of the Norfolk Churches Trust, a charity that works to preserve and keep open the county’s 659 medieval churches, the highest concentration in Europe and the vast majority Grade I listed. “And they lack the volunteers to go off and research the records elsewhere to discover if such liabilities exist. So if I were living in a Glebe Cottage right now, and I suspected that such a liability existed, I would be keeping very quiet until the deadline passes. As a solution to the funding crisis that we are facing, this is a red herring.”

So where does that leave All Saints, Waterden? It managed to piece together the £60,000 it needed by a variety of routes. The parish at South Creake organised fund‑raising activities. There was a contribution from English Heritage, the government-funded body charged with maintaining the nation’s historic landscape, plus money from Norfolk Churches Trust. And the local landowner, Viscount Coke of Holkham Hall, whose estate covers Waterden, also made a donation.

“Clearly the burden inevitably falls on the parish,” says Nigel Kenyon-Jones, treasurer of the South Creake parochial church council. “Most people seem to think that because the Church of England is the established church, it is the state that pays for the upkeep of Church of England buildings. That is a canard and a very damaging one.”

And even if the Church of England authorities could afford to pay, should they?

“Buildings cannot be seen as an end in themselves,” says Kenyon-Jones. “There is a danger of parishes, especially with a medieval church to maintain, focusing only on upkeep of the fabric. That is just one challenge. I would argue that a bigger, more urgent need is for us to be out there addressing the pastoral needs of our communities and showing how relevant we are.”

The former Bishop of Oxford, Lord Harries of Pentregarth, sees both sides of the argument. He was a member of a three-person team that earlier this month published a review of future needs of the Anglican Church in Wales. Describing ancient, if little used, rural churches as “sacraments in stone”, he commended their spiritual value: “If someone visits a small, isolated country church and finds that it is well-kept, cared for and clearly prayed in, this is itself a witness. So time and money spent caring for a building should not in principle be regarded as waste.”

Others take a more practical line. In many rural villages, the church is all that remains now that post offices, schools, shops and pubs have closed down, says Matthew Seward, deputy chief executive of the National Churches Trust. “These buildings can be transformed into multi-use community spaces by the installation of toilets, ramped access and other facilities. At the last general election, one in six of all votes cast were done so in polling stations located in churches.” That use needs to expand, he says, to make these places of worship once more relevant to the daily lives of the communities they were built to serve.

But adding loos and a kitchenette to a Grade I-listed building is not as simple as it sounds, argues Malcolm Fisher of the Norfolk Churches Trust. “Many of the churches that we support have no water, no electricity, and they stand alone.” The trust is currently working on a £300,000 programme of repairs to the tiny, square-towered All Saints, Cockthorpe, which dates back to medieval times and beyond, but which is located next to a disused Second World War aerodrome, a good deal more than a brisk walk from the nearest functioning village of Stiffkey.

“You can only get so far with coffee mornings,” says Fisher. “We are getting more applications for grants than ever before. The state needs to step in.” The same message is also coming from other funders. English Heritage has felt the full effects of government spending cuts, and will next year largely hand over its funding role to the Heritage Lottery Fund. Chancellor George Osborne’s recent decision to impose VAT on renovations to historic buildings, including churches, will also have an impact, even if offset by a grant he subsequently offered to the Church of England.

Meanwhile, repair bills continue to rise, thanks to costly new health and safety regulations, and 2011 was a record year for thefts of lead from church roofs, according to the main Church of England insurer. Many parishes simply feel overburdened by the duty to care for their church. And that is before they face the challenge of coping with bats in the belfry. As a protected species, they require costly expert handling.

“Everyone wants these ancient churches always to be there,” says Seward, “and they would say in survey after survey that they would miss them if they disappeared. But it costs a great deal of money to maintain such buildings, and at present there just aren’t enough people willing to pay for that.”