Welfare Benefits Up-rating Bill

Debate between Lord Bishop of Leicester and Lord Deben

Tuesday 19th March 2013 Lords Chamber

[The Lord Bishop of Leicester]

My Lords, I have lent my name in support of this amendment, and I am happy to speak in support of it.

This debate is about who should bear the greatest weight of the burden imposed by the Government’s need to reduce debt. I hope that the noble Lords, Lord King and Lord Forsyth, might consider accepting an invitation from me to come to the city of Leicester to explain to our local Child Poverty Commission why it is in the interests of children in poverty that they should become poorer at the moment because that will serve the national interest regarding debt, and that this House is working in their interests by reducing the uprating of their income to 1%, however much inflation rises. They might accept an invitation to explain that also to the unemployed and to voluntary associations in Leicester, which anticipate a tsunami of difficulties such as homelessness and dependence on food banks. They can come to listen to the response to this Bill from those who are dependent on benefits through no choice of their own, who can explain what that is like and how much harder it will get in the years ahead.

If the purpose of this Bill is to control welfare costs, this is not the right way to go about it. The key to reducing the benefit bill is to change the circumstances that lead many people to need benefits, such as the absence of job opportunities, too much short-term, low-paid work, the shortage of affordable housing, and expensive, patchy childcare. We should be focusing on those issues, not cutting benefits in real terms, which simply creates hardship without addressing the underlying issues.

This Bill is both unnecessary and ill conceived. It will harm the most vulnerable in our society and do nothing to promote work incentives. I have heard nothing at Second Reading, in Committee or today to make me change my view that this Bill ideologically shrinks the welfare state regardless of desperate need. Nor does it change my view that we are heading for a US-style welfare system that is dependent on food banks and hostels. We know that we can do better than this, we must do better than this, and we should amend the Bill.

[Lord Deben]

My Lords, I do not think that anyone could claim that I was other than at the wet end of the Conservative Party. I am perfectly prepared to say that. However, I have to speak after the right reverend Prelate because he has expressed exactly what the problem with Britain is: we are to spend money that we do not have on people who are in need, at a rate we cannot afford. That is not at all a Christian comment. In the end, we have to live within our means. For those of us who were brought up in the difficulties of a poorly paid Anglican parsonage, the first lesson that we learnt was to spend within our means.

I disagree with my noble friend Lord Forsyth, who said that the previous Government were not responsible. They are responsible, because they spent the money that was there and which could now be available for what we need. We were put in this position by the party opposite because it had the best inheritance of any Government, but it spent it and borrowed on top of it. I cannot find a single speech from any right reverend Prelate from that time that warns the Government of the dangers of spending money that they did not have, borrowed in a way that could not be repaid.

Public Bodies Bill [HL]

Debate between Lord Bishop of Leicester and Lord Deben

Monday 7th March 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Deben]

My Lords, I shall not keep your Lordships' House long but I want to make a further point. The Church of England is in a very real sense the guardian of the nation’s ecclesiastical treasures. It received them in circumstances which would be inconceivable today. We all have an interest in this. For many years I sat on the Ecclesiastical Committee as an Anglican and then as a Catholic. That change was perfectly reasonable because the Ecclesiastical Committee of the two Houses is there to ensure that decisions made perfectly properly by the Church of England do not detract from the interests of Her Majesty’s subjects as a whole.

The problem with the argument put forward by the right reverend Prelate is that it seeks to suggest that the Church of England is not the Church of England but a sect that is able to use its resources for its particular interests at a particular time. I warn the right reverend Prelate that his argument is very dangerous because his presence in this House is earnest of the fact that the Church of England is not thought by our society to be merely a sect. I have to admit that I left the Church of England because I believed that by making choices of a theological kind, it had changed—

[The Lord Bishop of Leicester]

Will the noble Lord agree with me that the argument I have been adducing is that the Church Commissioners have a responsibility to use the assets the church has acquired historically in whatever way they judge to be in the best interests of its service to the whole nation. That is precisely the basis of the argument for certain disposals; those wider interests should be borne in mind in the management of the church’s assets.

[Lord Deben]

The right reverend Prelate is making a judgment that I am suggesting is in fact, on this occasion—probably only on this occasion—erroneous. The fact is that the Church Commissioners are making a choice about how the historic property of the Church of England should be used in today’s world without, frankly, any thought of either tomorrow or yesterday. The Church of England has a duty to remember the interests of the whole church. This money will be applied to a number of charitable purposes, but the disposal will deprive our society of some very valuable things.

I hope that the right reverend Prelate will allow me to use a biblical comparison. Many people criticised Mary Magdalene for using valuable ointment on the feet of our Lord. He said very clearly that they were wrong in their judgment. My problem with right reverend Prelate’s argument is that I have heard it before. When I was a member of the General Synod of the Church of England, I argued that the assets of the church that protected the pensions of the right reverend Prelate and others should, in fact, be applied only to socially responsible investments. The secretary of the Church Commissioners got up and said, “We apply them using the very best advice of the City of London”. I said, “I thought the church was supposed to lead and set the example, not blame the City of London or suggest that the City can make moral judgments”. My noble and right reverend friend Lord Harries took the Church Commissioners to court on this issue and I am sad that he did not win. However, the Church Commissioners have changed their views on this.

This is the second reason why the right reverend Prelate is wrong, because if the Church Commissioners can invest, not for the best return on their money but on the basis that they will invest only in things that are proper for the Church of England to invest in, the church is making a judgment, not about what it can make the most money out of, but one which comes from its Gospel doctrines. I have to say that the idea that you could sell and allow to be taken—because that is what will happen if the position cannot be changed—from the walls of that great house a memorial to a moment in history when the Church of England stood up for the Gospel doctrines in a way which was remarkable for that century would be a manifest betrayal of the Church of England’s duty to look after the interests of the whole nation, rather than to seek to make an immediate profit for the use of a particular attitude and a particular church. That is not the role of the Church of England. This money is going to be spent not to protect interests in which all of us can join but to protect those of a no doubt very noble but particular position of the Church of England.

--- Later in debate ---

[The Lord Bishop of Leicester]

My Lords—

[Lord Deben]

I shall give way to the right reverend Prelate but I shall just finish this one point. The Church of England has to learn that, if it is to continue to have a place in our society, it has to show a generosity of spirit which it has not shown in this debate. It has not yet understood that it is the guardian of something that it did not buy. A bishop bought these pictures, and a church with which it is no longer connected built those great palaces. The Church of England has a duty to respect the past. It has a duty to pass it on to the future and not to say to today’s generation, “I’m very sorry, it’s nothing to do with us. We can sell this, use the money and it will go”. It cannot do that and still claim the privileges for which I have fought, and will continue to fight, even though I am not an Anglican. However, every time it does not understand what my noble friend Lord Inglewood was saying, it undermines the establishment of the Church of England.

[The Lord Bishop of Leicester]

I wonder whether the noble Lord can help me with the criticism that he seems to be levelling at the Church of England as being irresponsible in its custodianship of the heritage that it holds. I find that a quite extraordinary charge and it is one that I do not think has been substantiated by anything that the noble Lord has said.

In my diocese, I am the custodian of 300 medieval churches. It is an extraordinary heritage experienced by every diocesan bishop right across the land. Tonight, we are discussing whether the Church Commissioners should have responsibility for deciding how best to house the diocesan bishops of today and tomorrow. A number of references have been made to our history, some of them to the 12th and 13th centuries. I am sure it will not have escaped the notice of your Lordships that circumstances today are very different from those of the 12th and 13th centuries. You simply cannot manage a built estate today on precisely the same principles as applied then. There are different considerations and many pressures on the Church of England and the Church Commissioners. Some of those pressures include many people arguing that in an age of austerity it is inappropriate for bishops to be housed in castles and palaces. That is also a consideration that needs to be weighed. It is not reasonable to say that the Church of England is somehow, in a cavalier manner, disregarding its past and future responsibilities. I made precisely that point in my remarks. It has to weigh all of those and walk a tightrope between its responsibilities to its heritage, to the wider community, to the nation and to the gospel.

The noble Lord quoted the story of Mary Magdalene pouring precious ointment over the feet of our Lord. That is an important example, but the question for this House to resolve tonight is who is best placed to interpret that tradition, the Church Commissioners and the Church of England, established under Parliament by law, or the Secretary of State? I suggest that the present arrangements protect that interpretation more satisfactorily than whoever happens to be the Minister in charge from time to time.

[Lord Deben]

I promise not to hold your Lordships' House any longer, so I shall reply specifically to that. If I felt that the Church of England had carried through its necessary duties in a way that was commensurate with its great heritage, I would not be supporting the amendment. If the argument of the right reverend Prelate were made by anyone else, no one would take it seriously. If anyone said, “I am very sorry. I am now running a business and it is really very difficult for me to keep this house as it is”, people would say, “I’m afraid that is your responsibility; that is what happens if you have been given the house; you have to look after it properly”. It is all right arguing about the churches, but you cannot make any money out of the churches.