Written evidence submitted by
The Friends of Friendless Churches
Our organisation
The Friends of Friendless Churches (FoFC) was founded in 1957 to save beautiful, historic places of worship that are no longer in regular use. To date, we have rescued and repaired more than 60 listed places of worship. These are all now in our ownership. They are open daily, accessible to anyone free of charge, and are used by individuals or local communities.
We are a small charity. We do not receive public funding in England. In Wales, we receive a modest annual grant from Cadw and the Church in Wales.
Why we are submitting evidence
Our charity is experiencing firsthand the effects of declining congregations and a diminishing volunteer-force coupled with the perpetual struggle to access funding. This leads to the deterioration of historic buildings that can, ultimately, lead to their closure and a request for us to take them on. The demands on our limited resources are greater than they have ever been in the past 78 years. We welcome this inquiry and submit our evidence based on our experience of caring for listed, redundant places of worship in England and Wales since 1957.
The challenge
For the reasons given above, our national legacy of historic religious buildings is under threat. This is the greatest challenge facing the built heritage sector, and it is approaching a crisis point. We invite the Select Committee to consider two strategic questions:
Context
To put these questions into context:
There are about 15,000 religious buildings in England which are listed as of architectural or historic importance. Of these, around 12,200 belong to the Church of England, of which 8,500 are listed at Grade I or Grade II*. More than half of all the Grade I listed buildings in England are Church of England churches. In Wales, more than 3,000 places of worship are listed, over 200 of these are listed at Grade I.
These buildings are, collectively, unique in Europe on account of their architectural quality, their sheer numbers and their outstanding contents – sculpture, woodwork, wall paintings, stained glass, metalwork and fabrics. It is no exaggeration to say that churches contain the national collections of some of these artefacts. In almost every town and village in England churches and chapels are the physical embodiment of the history of that community.
The religious buildings of England and Wales are not just important centres of worship and not just culturally important, they are centres of community activity. Church congregations provide many services to their communities such as day centres for the elderly, mother and toddler groups, food banks, debt advice, youth activities and so forth. In many rural areas they are the only source of such services. And they set out to help not only churchgoers but anyone in their communities who is in need. This is well documented in the National Churches Trust’s research publication ‘House of Good’ which, using the Treasury’s Green Book methodology, placed an aggregate value of £55bn annually on services provided by church and chapel congregations in the UK. In many rural communities the church or chapel is one of the few – or even the last – community assets left, the only focus of activity that that community has. They are free to enter, often open all and a respite from a busy world.
Numbers in decline
The repair and maintenance of these buildings is the sole responsibility of their congregations, who also need to meet the other running costs of their church or chapel, not least the costs of employing a priest or pastor. In recent years some of these costs have risen sharply, especially those associated with energy, insurance and supply of materials for repairs.
The financial burden of maintenance and repair falls on a steadily decreasing number of people. Attendance at Anglican churches fell by more than 50% in the 50 years from 1970 and the average rate of loss is now above 2% a year. In 2019, 25% of Anglican congregations in England had Sunday attendance of 14 adults or less and in 600 cases, attendance was 7 adults or less.
Attendance is one matter, the other is volunteering time and skills to support a place of worship that, in many cases, is also a national heritage asset. This is a lot to ask.
In 2024, Historic England reckoned that as many as a quarter of churches in England do not have a churchwarden. The role of churchwarden is one of the oldest elected voluntary roles in England, and we rely on these people to ensure the upkeep of our church buildings. They will rarely be professionally qualified and people attend church to worship, not to look after a listed building. Without people willing to volunteer to care for the buildings they are put at even greater risk.
The decline of non-conformist congregation has been steeper, that of the Roman Catholic church somewhat less severe.
Furthermore, around 3,000 churches are located in areas where only 1.1% of the population of England lives (all of these attendance figures are drawn from Caring for Churches and Chapels in England: the long view published in 2024 by The Historic Religious Buildings Alliance).
Considering this, there are a number of ways in which we think the government could encourage and support people back into caring for their historic buildings.
Funding gap
Congregations of all denominations get very little help with meeting the cost of maintaining their buildings. It is true that the wider community of non-churchgoers will often contribute to the cost of maintaining their parish church, even if they do not use it.
For 40 years from 1977, Historic England and its predecessor bodies were funded by government to give grants for the repair of listed places of worship. This simple scheme was very successful in maintaining and improving the state of repair of these buildings and in encouraging heritage skills, especially in rural areas. Reductions in Historic England’s budget led to the closure of this grant programme in 2011. The National Lottery Heritage Fund stepped into the breach with its own grant programme for churches but this closed in 2017. Although the level of grants from the Lottery Heritage Fund to church buildings has increased very recently, it is well below that achieved in 2016-17. The effect of this reduction has been compounded by a substantial fall in grants given for church repairs by charitable grant-giving trusts, many of which switched to the support of social causes during the Covid pandemic and have not reverted. The government’s decision to reduce the amount of funding for the Listed Places of Worship scheme (which meets the cost of VAT on repairs to listed churches and chapels) will have yet a further detrimental effect on churches’ ability to undertake major repair projects.
The lack of available funding and the difficulty in accessing that funding, particularly for rural communities, is undeniably an inhibiting factor. Individuals and communities may have the very best intentions for use of their building, but if all their time and energy is directed into completing grant application forms, running fundraising campaigns, applying for permissions and consents, dealing with rejections and re-evaluating their situation, there is precious little motivation left over. It is important to state: it can take years for a church community to organise repairs and raise the required funds. This needs to be addressed urgently to prevent the exponential increase in closures and disposals.
Closures
While rural parish churches have proved remarkably durable through centuries of change, including previous periods of decline, the present attendance trajectory must, if not reversed soon, lead to mass abandonment and closure of Anglican churches as has already happened in parts of England to non-conformist chapels (and still more severely in Wales and Scotland). If nothing is done to help these small congregations meet the costs of keeping their buildings in repair, not only will the abandonment of churches become more likely but they will be in worse condition when they close and more difficult and expensive to preserve as monuments or convert to other uses. Closures of churches because of congregations’ inability to meet the costs of repair have begun to happen. And the number of churches on Historic England’s Heritage at Risk Register has increased steadily in recent years: there are now 866 churches on the register.
Since 1969, the Churches Conservation Trust (CCT)—established following the Bridges Commission on Redundant Churches—has provided an excellent home for England’s best closed churches. Today, it cares for over 350 churches but struggles to meet the growing challenge due to insufficient funding from the Church of England (CofE). The CofE’s reluctance to cover the costs of vesting churches in the CCT’s long-term care has resulted in a backlog of 50 to 60 highly listed churches—though the exact number remains undisclosed. Many of these churches, eligible for CCT protection, have remained unused and deteriorating for over 20 years. These are classified as Last-Resort Vesting (LRV) churches—historic churches of significant quality that should be vested in the CCT if no alternative solution is found. Their designation as LRV churches comes from the Statutory Advisory Committee, which includes representatives nominated by the DCMS to safeguard the State’s interests.
What the government could do
The problem of funding repairs could be solved at relatively little cost to government if it were to take the lead in constructing a package of financial support for the repair of churches and chapels. In our view it need not shoulder this burden alone but could reasonably look for a partnership in which the Lottery Heritage Fund and the national organisations of the churches themselves made substantial contributions. In the case of the Church of England which has the biggest problem because of its huge legacy of listed buildings, the Church Commissioners have in recent years already made a start by establishing a fund for small repair grants: they need to be persuaded to go further and the other denominations to follow suit. Such a grant scheme could be constructed so as to maintain incentives for congregations to raise money themselves and to seek grants from charitable trusts, as now.
Separate arrangements would probably be needed for cathedrals where the scale of the problem is different, though again, each Chapter has the sole responsibility for maintaining its building.
Given the present state of the public finances, it is unrealistic to expect government to commit in the near-future to financial support for church repairs. But it would not be unreasonable to expect government to commit now to the principle of such support and to begin to consider how it might be delivered and at what scale when financial pressures ease. This is just what happened in 1976, when the principle of government support was announced and negotiations began to design the State Aid scheme operating from mid-1977.
If government does nothing, the scale of the problem will grow as church closures increase and it will eventually become the government’s problem.
Other support
Apart from the funding of repairs, the other thing which small congregations lacking human resources need is hands-on advice on how to raise money and how to get repairs done. The appointment of church support officers in most Anglican dioceses, funded by the Church Commissioners and charged with the role of galvanising and helping congregations whose buildings are in a bad state, is therefore an important step in the right direction.
Other models
We would like to see a move towards a commitment not to sell any Grade I listed place of worship for domestic conversion or private use – in line with the recommendations from Historic England, and in effect, DCMS. We also believe that there should be a presumption against converting Grade II* churches for domestic conversion. Domestic conversion almost always destroys the aesthetic value of the building and removes it from the public realm. This approach is likely to result in the dispersal and/or destruction of church contents, which could be a major loss of material culture.
We do appreciate that for many large urban churches and rural buildings which are unlisted or listed grade II, conversion for commercial or residential use may be the only option.
The inquiry asked how the Government could make it easier for communities or local businesses to take ownership of historic buildings. In the case of places of worship community asset transfer is being promoted as a solution to closed buildings. There are certainly instances where this could work, however, ownership is only one very small part of the picture: the new owners, in addition to running their activities or business need to have the capacity to care for a nationally or locally important structure and its works of art; with this goes basic knowledge and sympathy of repairing a listed building and navigating the planning system to implement any changes to the building (ecology, archaeology, etc), access to funding as covered and, crucially - succession planning. In our experience, community initiatives often only survive on the energy and experience of one person or one group. When people inevitably move away, age or die, there needs to be a plan in place that the historic place of worship doesn’t become vacant or fall into disrepair after a single generation of vision and enthusiasm.
A new commission
Of course, even an adequate grant programme will not save all churches: many congregations will still fail for lack of numbers even if their church is in good condition. 3,500 places of worship in the UK have closed since 2013. The Church Commissioners have estimated that a further 314 – 368 Anglican churches in England will close in the next 2 to 5 years. The Royal Commission estimates that Wales could lose 70% of its places of worship in the next decade. This scale of closures cannot be solved or sustained by the existing preservation trusts. This is why we ask the committee to urgently recommend to Government that a commission to review current provisions and recommend solutions is appointed. This should be similar to the Bridges Commission appointed in 1960 and which led to an inquiry, and ultimately, the creation of a Church Measure to protect England’s best churches. The recommendations that were implemented were, at the time, fit for purpose, but we are now facing a problem of an altogether greater magnitude.