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Welfare: Churches and Faith Communities

My Lords, I am grateful for the opportunity to discuss these important issues. It is consistent with his considerable contribution to the church’s thinking and action relating to social justice that the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Chelmsford should have asked for this debate. Situated in his diocese is the ambitious Thames Gateway project in which I know he takes an active interest. The success of the gateway will depend on getting the right levels of engagement with all stakeholders and, in the end, the key stakeholders are local people and local communities. Noble Lords have raised a great many significant issues that I shall endeavour to address. This debate offers us an opportunity to look at our policies for engaging local people and enabling them to have a greater say in shaping their communities. The role of the voluntary or third sector is crucial in this. Before I go any further, I want to stress that when I talk about the third sector, I include the churches and faith communities fully and unambiguously. Faith communities bring distinctive elements to the table. Many of them have been shared with us today, and I shall touch on them. It is also fair to say that there are particular barriers to their full involvement as part of the third sector. However, we are aware of them, and they are challenging, but not insurmountable. This debate is an important opportunity for us all to reflect on what progress has already been made and what more needs to be done. Informed comment on public policy by faith communities has a long history. We need look back no further than 1985 when the Archbishop of Canterbury’s Commission on Urban Priority Areas published its report, Faith in the City. Faiths also bring very practical assets. For example, in 2003, the North-West Development Agency published a report on the economic value of faith communities. It found that through their buildings and volunteers, faith communities contributed over £90 million per annum to the regional economy. Our recent policies have increasingly reflected the importance of the third sector and faith communities. Let me set out a few examples. In July, we published the empowerment White Paper, Communities in Control: Real People, Real Power. The summary states: "““We want to generate vibrant local democracy in every part of the country, and to give real control over local decisions and services to a wider pool of active citizens.""We want to shift power, influence and responsibility away from existing centres of power into the hands of communities and individual citizen … A vibrant participatory democracy should strengthen our representative democracy. The Third Sector… has much to offer””." I hope that makes clear that the third sector, and faith communities as an integral part of that sector, are right at the heart of our vision for better places. These are not mere words. Last month, my right honourable friend Hazel Blears, Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, launched our Participatory Budgeting: A Draft National Strategy. Participatory budgeting directly involves local people in making decisions on spending priorities. Most importantly, the Participatory Budgeting Unit, the key delivery agency, is a project of Church Action on Poverty, a faith-based organisation located in Manchester. It is difficult to imagine a clearer example of partnership in which the direct implementation of a key central government policy is being taken forward at community level by an organisation with its roots in the values of Christian social justice, not, of course, because it is a faith-based organisation, but because it is fit for the purpose. I have said that there are many challenges. In July we published the interfaith framework, Face-to-Face and Side-by-Side. It highlighted a number of commitments to ongoing work, in partnership with faith communities, aimed at tackling some of the barriers to capturing the full potential of faith-based organisations. I shall give noble Lords several examples. We are working to refresh and update the Local Government Association’s faith and community guidelines for good working relationships between faith communities and local authorities. We also recognise the need for greater faith or religious literacy among officials to equip them to work more effectively with faith communities, and we are working on a potential project on this. It will address the issue raised by noble Lords about faith groups not simply seeking money or contracts but inherently doing the right thing. Officials need to understand the combination of those delicate factors. We made a commitment to develop a charter for faith organisations involved in service delivery to address perceived nervousness about allocating public funding to faith-based organisations. Short-term funding is a significant issue which was raised by the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Chelmsford and other noble Lords. As someone who worked in the third sector for many years, I understand the need for long-term funding, and I am pleased to say that since 1997 we have conducted three reviews of the third sector. Faith communities contributed a great deal to the last review in particular, and the most reverend Primate the Archbishop of York served on its advisory board. All three reviews tackled the issue of short-term funding. We have made considerable progress, and with three-year financial settlements, local authorities are now better placed to offer longer-term funding. Although I recognise what my noble friend Lord Judd said about not chasing after contracts, this is not just about that issue. Another excellent example is our work in partnership with the Church Urban Fund to publish Believing in Local Action alongside Face-to-Face and Side-by-Side. Believing in Local Action is a series of case studies about the benefits of partnership working between faith communities and the third sector at local level. It underlines the importance of seeing faith communities as part of the third sector. The obvious question is why we involve third sector organisations in delivering public services. The reason is pragmatic: it works. Among the sector’s strengths is an ability to do things differently and put an individual’s need at the heart of things. The noble Lord, Lord Roberts, spoke about his experience working with Polish migrants and the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Chelmsford mentioned Jean and her work with young people. We talked about offenders, young and old, who are being supported and about debt counselling. My noble friend Lord Plant talked about the importance of independence and the ethos that drives the services that are delivered. The third sector brings an enormous amount to the table. Third-sector organisations are most often trusted by the people they work with, particularly the most vulnerable and marginalised. We want to draw on all the sector’s strengths by working together in partnership. Once again, I stress how all that I have said about the third sector embraces faith groups, whose local rootedness means that they often demonstrate these strengths to a high degree. The Office of the Third Sector is currently conducting a national survey of third-sector organisations. It has questions that will identify faith organisations and help us get a better picture of their circumstances and what issues affect them. The noble Lord, Lord Griffiths of Fforestfach, and my noble friend Lord Judd introduced an important point on the role of the Charity Commission. Following its successful consultation with independent and black-majority churches, it ran a series of workshops with a range of faith-based charities to learn more about the way they work and to help strengthen their governance and effectiveness. Building on that consultation, and with the support of the Department for Communities and Local Government, the commission is setting up a dedicated unit to work with and support faith-based charities. The Faith and Social Cohesion Unit will provide support and advice to faith-based groups through outreach work, capacity building training and guidance and aims to do a number of things. It aims to engage with faith communities to identify and support organisations that could be, but currently are not, registered with the commission, to assist faith-based charities to improve their standards of governance and accountability and thereby increase their effectiveness, to work collaboratively to achieve and promote well run and effectively regulated faith-based charities and improve the commission’s and wider society’s understanding of faith-based charities. I shall say a word about some of our departmental strategies. Many government departments have published their own plans for increasing the involvement of the third sector with sections dedicated to faith communities. For example, following a consultation, the National Offender Management Service will soon be publishing a paper on working with the third sector to reduce reoffending. It will include specific commitments to ensure that faith-based groups are involved effectively. The noble Lord, Lord Northbourne, raised several issues. He clearly outlined some of the objectives of the extended schools service. He asked a series of questions, and I think that this is right for me to write to him with a full response with specific answers the questions that he raised. However, the program is happening. We are investing a significant amount of money and many local organisations are involved. Suffice it to say that schools are not expected to provide extended services alone, or necessarily to deliver them on-site. They should be working in partnership with local authorities, other schools and local partners, including the private and voluntary sector and community organisations. We envisage a strong role for the voluntary and private sectors in delivering extended services in partnership with the schools. The services developed in schools should complement and join with other services and providers where they are already in place. I turned to the importance of community cohesion, where faith communities have a particularly valuable contribution to make. The noble Lords, Lord Dixon-Smith and Lord Northbourne, raised the issue of faith schools. The Government support faith schools. We recognise that they are often in demand locally and make a positive contribution to local cohesion. This country has a long tradition of promoting co-operation and mutual respect between people of different faiths. The interfaith framework, Face-to-Face and Side-by-Side, aims to increase partnership working with and between faith communities at all levels, from the national to the local, to improve local cohesion. The framework depends on the enormous amount of existing interfaith activity by faith communities themselves. Before concluding it would be remiss of me not to mention the Von Hügel report. The right reverend Prelates and several other noble Lords, especially the noble Lord, Lord Roberts, referred rather poetically to the Von Hügel report. If noble Lords will forgive me, I cannot comment directly on the report, although it does raise some important issues which we are committed to exploring further with the Church of England and others. The Church of England has asked for time to discuss the report internally through its structures and to make a formal response to the report and its recommendations. We will wait for the Church of England to complete that process before commenting further. I have inevitably focused on the Government’s side of things. I said at the beginning that these are complex and challenging matters. I hope that I have made clear that in all our policies and programmes, we are aiming at partnership with the third sector and faith communities. We each have our strengths and our limitations. Real and effective partnership is demanding. It requires us to be open, transparent and, most importantly, honest with one another. I repeat that we have all achieved a great deal, but there is still more to be done. The Government will continue to strive to equip themselves to work better with faith communities, just as I hope that churches and all faith communities will seek to build their capacity to engage further and deeper in all aspects of public life. The outcome at which we should all be aiming is not a good deal for government or for faith communities, but better places for people to live—places where social justice and respect for difference help to shape the life of communities. That, I am sure all noble Lords agree, is the real theme of this debate. I again thank the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Chelmsford for tabling this important debate and all noble Lords for their valuable contributions.