CHURCH BUILDINGS COUNCIL

The CBC is a relatively new statutory body and its duties, powers and functions are set out in sections 54–57 of the Dioceses, Pastoral and Mission Measure 2007 (DPMM). The Council came into being on 11 June 2008 and replaces both the Council for the Care of Churches and the Advisory Board for Redundant Churches. This article focuses on the CBC's role in relation to churches in use. The Council's duties, as set out in section 55(1) of the DPMM, are broadly:

1. i. to advise the Archbishops' Council and General Synod on matters relating to churches;

2. ii. to consider consultation by and requests for advice by judges and registrars and Diocesan Advisory Committees in relation to applications for faculties ‘and, to the extent that the Council thinks appropriate, respond to such requests or consultation’;

3. iii. to promote the care and conservation of churches and greater knowledge, understanding and enjoyment of and artistic activity relating to churches and to promote (in consultation with other such persons and organisations as it thinks fit), by means of guidance or otherwise, standards of good practice in relation to the use, care, conservation, repair, planning, design and development of churches;

4. iv. to convene annually a meeting of the chairmen and secretaries of DACs and, so far as practicable, to remain in regular contact with these committees.

Thus the duties of the CBC cover the strategic and the particular, together with the role of spreading best practice. Moreover, unlike the Cathedrals Fabric Commission, which has a statutory function of determining applications concerning alterations to cathedrals, the CBC's function in relation to chancellors, DACs and parishes is advisory only, rather than regulatory.

The Faculty Jurisdiction Rules,Footnote ² specifically rule 15, require the CBC to be consulted by chancellors over certain works. The CBC has a statutory function to be consulted in relation to petitions for the demolition or partial demolition of churches. Otherwise neither the Care of Churches and Ecclesiastical Jurisdiction Measure 1991 nor the Faculty Jurisdiction Rules are definitive about proposed works on which the CBC should be consulted, particularly by DACs and parishes. Moreover, the DPMM expressly states in section 55(1)(b) that where the Council is consulted for advice, it is under a duty to consider that consultation or request but it is obliged to respond to it only ‘to the extent that the Council thinks appropriate’.

Schedule 4 of the DPMM sets out the membership of the CBC, comprising a Chair, appointed by the Archbishops of Canterbury and York after consultation with the Appointments Committee of the Church of England and not more that 23 other members. The Schedule ensures members have a range of expertise and knowledge and sets out who shall nominate members, including three from General Synod, four by the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport and three by the annual meeting of the Chairmen and Secretaries of the DACs.

The CBC is supported by the 15 staff of the Cathedral and Church Buildings Division of the Archbishops' Council and currently the Council meets nine times a year. Where appropriate, delegations of the staff, who may be accompanied by members, visit churches on which the CBC has been asked for advice. The facts of the case and the recommendations of the delegation are discussed at full meetings of the Council before a letter setting out the CBC's advice is sent to the applicant.

In 2008 the CBC gave advice on 332 cases of churches in use. This encompassed a wide range of work from reorderings and extensions to disposals, the introduction of new works of art, such as stained glass, and advice on conservation. The 332 cases (on average 37 cases per meeting) bear witness to the huge amount of work going on in our church buildings nationally, whether repair work or improving the missionary and community potential of churches. The CBC is encouraged by the DPMM to work with other organisations and the benefits of collaboration in this great enterprise of looking after church buildings are obvious. This includes the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings (SPAB) and its ‘Faith in Maintenance’ courses on maintaining churches, English Heritage and its part-funding of diocesan-based historic buildings support officers; the National Churches Trust and its funding and friends programmes and the Churches Conservation Trust and its initiatives on alternative uses for church buildings and on church tourism.

The faculty system is a great partnership enterprise in itself, with collaboration at its core, but it might be considered a little out of balance at the moment. From the perspective of the CBC the following can be noted:

1. i. DACs sometimes lack a clear understanding of what casework they should be sending to the CBC;

2. ii. In 2008 the CBC reviewed 332 cases. This is more than 10% higher than the previous year and 600% more than in 1992, when its records began. So the CBC's casework on individual churches is growing all the time. Further analysis reveals nothing referred from several dioceses, but no less than 7% of the total number of one diocese's churches referred as casework to the CBC in 2008. In other words, what was sent to the CBC for consultation and advice was at best inconsistent. The volume of casework referred inevitably also means the CBC devotes relatively limited time and resources to each case, which means it cannot devote the time and follow-up which more complex cases clearly merit;

3. iii. Recently, in the context of the consultation over the new Ecclesiastical Exemption Order,Footnote ³ two of the amenity societies, the SPAB and the Victorian Society, have questioned whether the Church of England's faculty system offers equivalence of protection to the secular system. Those of us working within the faculty system might argue the opposite, that the faculty system has tighter control over proposed changes in churches. But even so we need to be alive to the concerns of the amenity societies.

The Church of England's faculty system has huge strengths. It reflects the fact that it is an episcopal church, where dioceses are the key entities with bishops as leaders in mission and ministry. Thus each church in each diocese is able to tap into huge expertise and local knowledge in its own DAC, and the collective responsibility of all involved in the faculty jurisdiction, including the CBC, is to build on these strengths.

TWO RECENT CASE STUDIES

MAKING POLICY FOR THE FUTURE

From the vantage point of the CBC, there is an urgent need for greater clarity about who is responsible for what within the faculty system: operational clarity is in the interests of all concerned. Anne Sloman, the Chair, together with the members and staff of the CBC, have decided we need to make its work more consistent and transparent, more thorough and robust where it needs to be and with greater follow-up. The CBC needs to devote greater focused efforts to provide at the national level a service to parishes that supports and complements the work of archdeacons and DACs.

Drawing on input from a range of individuals who work within the faculty system, the members and staff of the Church Buildings Council have come up with proposals that are currently out to consultation with DACs, including archdeacons, and with registrars and chancellors. The consultation paper is entitled: The Church Buildings Council and DACs: Forging a New Partnership; and as its title implies, the CBC considers DACs pivotal in the workings of the faculty system. DACs possess enormous expertise and local knowledge. DACs also have an ongoing relationship with parish churches. DACs review and give advice on all applications for faculties before they are formally submitted. The consultation paper therefore proposes that:

1. i. Any casework referred to the CBC for formal advice should only come through a DAC. There should be no referrals for formal advice to the CBC direct from parishes;Footnote ⁵

2. ii. The CBC should restrict its formal advice to significant, complex, ground breaking or controversial interventions. Everything else should be formally reviewed by the DAC.

The consultation paper Forging a New Partnership attempts to define for DACs what it considers significant casework from a national or strategic perspective. The proposals also work within the new Planning Policy 5: planning for the historic environment, adopting a heritage-based approach, not least by using a referrals grid based on the significance of the building and the level of impact of the proposed works. The referrals grid uses the national designation system of Grade 1, Grade 2* and Grade 2 buildings (although arguably the listing system does not sufficiently differentiate buildings of superior historic, artistic or contextual significance from all the rest).Footnote ⁶

Forging a New Partnership gives DACs examples of what the CBC expects to give advice on. This ranges from major liturgical reorderings and extensions adding significantly to the footprint of a significant building to works involving new technology (such as innovative environmentally-sound heating solutions) or other works that may set a precedent that could usefully be disseminated to others, and situations where there is controversy over the advice provided thus far. The paper also gives examples on which the CBC does not expect to give formal advice, including the removal of unexceptional pews where this does not impact greatly on the character of the churchFootnote ⁷ and straightforward west-end insertions, like lavatories and kitchens. The paper emphasises the benefits of early advice, of the CBC being asked for advice before the DAC has issued its certificate, and of participating in early round-table discussions on significant interventions. It also sets out basic information the CBC requires on consultation, including a Statement of Significance with an assessment of the environmental impact of the proposed works, and a Statement of Needs.Footnote ⁸ In return the CBC will convey its advice in writing within ten days of the CBC meeting at which a case is discussed. No doubt the CBC needs to do more to present its advice more professionally and to be more transparent. These are areas to be worked on with the chancellors and DACs.

Finally the CBC needs to be seen to be taking a consistent, thorough and robust approach to works and activities impacting on nationally significant church buildings. The first challenge is to ensure the CBC gets to see all the cases that fall into this category, and the CBC is confident that if DACs follow the guidelines set out in the paper, Forging a New Partnership, that will happen. It is then over to the CBC to devote greater time and resource to these critical cases and, moreover, follow up by disseminating the lessons learned from these cases.

The CBC's track record could be better: for example, its forebear, the Council for the Care of Churches, only made one visit to the £36 million development at the iconic St Martin-in-the-Fields in central London's Trafalgar Square. The value the Council added to that project was probably very small. The CBC needs to get involved with Bath Abbey's plans and a joint visit with Bath and Wells DAC is being arranged. The CBC should have got involved much earlier with the Jarrow and Wearmouth bid for UNESCO World Heritage Site status.

Over the last five years practical intervention by the CBC has made a significant difference to the outcomes on some major churches, such as St Mary Priory Church in Totnes in the diocese of Exeter, a church that might have been facing possible closure but which was used by the CBC as a pilot for preparing a conservation management plan and has since been reinvigorated and is now applying for £1.5 million funding for a re-ordering and landscaping project.

A further significant intervention by the CBC is the case of St Peter's Draycott, where the CBC, along with the Victorian Society, successfully intervened in a successful appeal to the Court of Arches, reversing the decision of the consistory court and thereby preventing the disposal by sale of an important, historic font. That appeal also gave the Court of the Arches the opportunity to review the existing authorities relating to the sale of valuable articles and to set out the legal principles involved in deciding such cases in the future.Footnote ⁹

But for all the successes there are too many examples of major churches where the CBC's expertise or staff resource was not called in or was called in too late to make a difference. The CBC's intention is to improve this track record, in consultation with DAC chairs and secretaries, archdeacons, registrars, chancellors and others at General Synod anticipating the launch of new guidelines at the DAC conference in Lincoln in September 2010.

SUPPORTING PARISHES AND DIOCESES

As the DPMM makes plain, attending to particular casework constitutes only part of the CBC's duties. Section 55(1)(d) states that the CBC has a duty to ‘promote in consultation with other such persons and organisations as it thinks fit, by means of guidance or otherwise, standards of good practice in relation to the use, care, conservation, repair, planning, design and development of churches’. The Cathedral and Church Buildings Division of the Archbishops' Council, with 15 full-time staff, leads the development of national policy in respect of the Church of England's 16,000 places of worship, one function of which is to support the two statutory bodies, the Cathedrals Fabric Commission for England and the CBC itself; another might be described as getting the best for and out of church buildings, which has much crossover with the CBC's duty to promote good practice.

Good practice falls into four main areas:

1. i. Formal support for DACs: Section 55(1)(e) of the DPMM sets out the duty to remain in regular contact with DACs. Responding to invitations, I have been attending individual DAC meetings, regional DAC conferences, and the CBC Chair joined me at the most recent, the Northern Province conference. The CBC is now putting more resources into DAC training. In October 2009 it ran a DAC induction course for new DAC chairs and secretaries in London, and a similar session in Penrith in March 2010. One DAC secretary, who attended the Penrith session, said that in ten years in the job he had never attended any induction or other DAC training. Every year we run additional specialist seminars for DAC members such as on organs and bells and in May the CBC organised for the first time for several years its residential course on historic building conservation at West Dean College. We are also considering how we can help DACs with resourcing problems. We have conducted a survey into what specialisms DACs are having problems filling.

2. ii. Support and advice for parishes: With 16,000 churches to support, this is most effectively done nationally by Churchcare, the online support website for church buildings, and via the Shrinking the Footprint website, which promotes the Church of England's environmental campaign. Thanks to outside sponsorship the CBC has put in extra staff resource here, and it is constantly striving to make both of these websites more customer-focused and responsive to parish demands eg by incorporating FAQs on Shrinking the Footprint and including case studies on Churchcare which illustrate the range of extended uses now taking place in our churches. Not everyone has access to the internet or broadband and the CBC is receptive to hearing from users about alternative ways of providing informal advice (and will consider a telephone helpline if that is felt most helpful, but remains mindful of not undermining DACs in their crucial interface with parishes). The CBC is also keen to encourage parishes to consult with it informally at as early a stage as possible particularly for specialist advice, eg from our six specialist conservation committees.

3. iii. Training in understanding and managing church buildings: This is equally important and the CBC has started to tackle it by a series of seminars, under the umbrella banner ‘Crossing the Threshold’, mostly intended to train the trainers in extended use of church buildings. This is another key area of partnership as the CBC is running all these courses in conjunction with others including dioceses, the Liturgical Commission and the Church Urban Fund.

4. iv. Practical solutions to common concerns: environmental sustainability is a significant challenge. In response to huge demand for knowhow on environmental and sustainability issues the CBC has posted a ‘taking action’ path on the updated Shrinking the Footprint website. It starts with advice on auditing and recommendations for using energy efficiently. It then sets out the different options available and finally signposts the reader to where he or she can find more detailed information. Just as we put resource into archaeology 10 years ago, we probably need now to put more resource into sustainability and environmental issues. In the same way the CBC is preparing guidance notes for posting on the Churchcare website on the issues that crop up most regularly at CBC meetings, and is currently working on a note on what to consider when chairs are being selected to in place of pews. Bats are a major health hazard issue as well as a threat to the historic fabric and furnishing of churches. A significant minority of churches are desperate to find practical solutions under the law. Working with Natural England the Church Buildings Division is currently sponsoring some practical research in pilot churches in Norfolk to see what needs be done to get a licence under the Wildlife and Countryside Act 1981, as amended by the Countryside and Rights of Way Act 2000. The results will be brought to the Conservation Forum on Bats in Lambeth Palace in November 2010.