§ 4.26 p.m.
§ Second Reading debate resumed.
§ The Lord Bishop of MANCHESTERMy Lords, I feel sure there will be very general sympathy for the noble Lord, Lord Clifford of Chudleigh, that he has for a third time been compelled to move the Second Reading of this Bill. I venture to hope that a little sympathy might be reserved for myself since I do not start with the advantage of those friendly expressions which were offered to the Minister on this issue. Bishops, it seems, are excluded from such friendliness ex officio. On a question where it is easy to represent confrontation as one between David and Goliath, the rights of small communities as ever against the unsympathetic forces of Church and State, it would be much more agreeable to be cast in the role of Jonathan than that of the armour-bearer of the 100 Philistine. What is more, it falls to the Bishop of an overwhelmingly urban diocese to reply to what is essentially a case urged on behalf of rural communities. I may remark in passing that it seems to me one of the serious objections to the Bill that it is so widely drawn as to apply to situations where it would hardly be appropriate. In the case of large cities the definition of "the local community" would become a great deal more difficult than previous critics of the Bill have already alleged it to be in the case of villages.
It may not, however, be altogether irrelevant to illustrate some of the statements which were made by the noble Lord, Lord Crowther-Hunt, and to mention two considerations applying to the diocese of Manchester, an area where church schools have traditionally made a large contribution to the educational system. The first consideration is that we have a very fair sprinkling of schools no longer used as such which are available to the parishes concerned as halls and which give a good deal of service to the local community as a whole. The second consideration is that since the passing of the 1944 Act we have in one diocese alone built 65 new schools, or parts of schools, and carried out major adaptations in another 84 at a cost to the Church of £1½ million; and in the meanwhile a great many school sites have been taken over by local authorities. Yet even after so great an effort it appears very likely that there will be a continuing movement in change of status from aided to controlled schools, because of the serious financial consequences of decisions made by national or local government, comprehensive reorganisation, raising of the school-leaving age, addition of nursery units and so forth.
I mention these instances of difficulties which recur in every part of the country, not in order to manifest any sense of ingratitude towards successive Governments for the great measure of assistance that the Church has received from them, and is about to receive in greater measure; but I think that they would serve at least to rebut any charge of mere denominational selfishness or unnecessarily callous behaviour in our showing resistance to the terms of this Bill. What is ultimately at stake is the preservation 101 of the dual system, even on a very modified scale, or else its total collapse in an age of serious inflation. I hope that even those who may wish for its abolition would not wish this to come about in quite such a lamentable and unpremeditated manner.
It would be improper for me to comment upon local situations of which I have no knowledge such as that out of which Lord Clifford of Chudleigh's personal concern has arisen. I also think it unnecessary to deploy again all those arguments which my right reverend brothers on these Benches and successive Ministers have already put forward. On the 2nd April the noble Lord, Lord Clifford of Chudleigh, declared that the euphemistic language of the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Saint Albans cut no ice. In that case the Scotsman, to whom euphemistic language comes less naturally, may perhaps be excused from employing any more of it. It does not seem to me that this Bill as it stands is capable of achieving the end with which any right-minded person should sympathise; namely, the giving of as much opportunity as possible to a village community to have some say in the use of its local buildings when these are to be disposed of. It has already been shown more than once that the Bill is too widely and imprecisely drawn and that its effect would be to drive a coach and horses through the law affecting religious and educational trusts. The noble Lord, Lord Clifford of Chudleigh, said that he had objection to tampering with trusts, but surely that is an argument that cuts both ways in this debate.
Having said this, however, I am far from wishing to end on a purely negative note towards the intention of the Bill. Having made inquiries, I am satisfied that the Church authorities concerned would be most willing to hold a conference with representatives of the Secretary of State in order to see what can be done to meet what this House has already shown to be a strongly held point of view, without thereby sacrificing the legitimate interests which the Church of England holds in trust. It happens already in a good many places that, although the official duty of the trustees is to obtain the highest price for a disused school, arrangements are made by which a local 102 organisation, or the local church, can purchase the property. My hope is that if this Bill should not succeed, the Minister himself will be willing, sooner or later, to initiate legislation of a more precise kind in order to achieve some, at least, of the objects for which the Bill was framed.
§ 4.32 p.m.
§ Lord ELTONMy Lords, this is a small Bill, and it has been presented very often, as small Bills so often are—so often, in fact, that my noble friend Lord Clifford of Chudleigh has put himself in the same relationship to this House as a tailor to a Regency Beau, in that whenever your Lordships come to town there is the noble Lord, Lord Clifford, waiting upon you with his Bill; and as often as he presents it, your Lordships, led by the Government, go back to the country and he has to re-write it and present it again. One might leave the matter there if this were not a somewhat larger and more complex matter than the brevity and simplicity of the Bill suggests, and if it were not a matter of interest and even of importance to a much larger number of people than are likely to follow its progress through the columns of Hansard.
My noble friend's concern, which is quite widely shared up and down the country, and, I believe, up and down the Benches of this House, is with the buildings of endowed schools which were endowed by members of the community for the benefit of that community but which are no longer either needed or used as schools. However, the fact that they are no longer required or used as schools does not mean that they do not still have an important role to play in the functioning of a rural community. I specify "the rural community", as have the last two speakers, because I do not think that the same problem exists in the towns. In the village the schoolroom is very often the only focus of communal secular activity and, indeed, of a great deal of communal church activity as well—none of it strictly educational and most of it ordinarily taking place out of school hours, even when the school is no longer used as a school. Many a Parliamentary election campaign meeting attended by your Lordships has been enlivened by the art of infant and junior classes attractively, and occasionally appositely, displayed behind the candidate's head.
103 When the school ceases to be used for teaching, its other function, as a focus of community activity and spirit, still has to be discharged—bazaars, jumble sales, W.I. meetings, whist drives, harvest suppers, and PCC parish council and charity trustees' meetings. I am sure that I could add to the long list which the noble Lord, Lord Clifford of Chudleigh, has himself presented of activities which go on there, including Sunday schools, evening classes and the like. They all need a place in which to happen, and if they do not happen a valuable aspect of village life will rapidly be lost. The only place in which they can happen in many villages today is the village school.
If your Lordships will forgive a very brief discursus, from the earliest times the English village has centred on a meeting place. When the Angles seized the land their first action was to throw up a stockade of stakes and thorns and begin immediately to build the fire-hall of their chief; and in the body of that building, even after their own huts were built, the villagers could come for warmth, revelry and justice. In fine weather they could go to the moot-place or the green. In the Middle Ages they could go to the hall or the church. But with the gradual retirement of the gentry into a more private life, and with the church being reserved more exclusively for worship, there was again a need for a meeting place warmer than the green and bigger than the pub. From the end, or, indeed, the middle of the 19th century, it was supplied either by a village hall which was purpose built or by the accommodation of the village school.
I hope that your Lordships are actually as well as theoretically aware of the important, indeed the crucial role played by a central meeting place of this kind in any small rural community. It is, after all, common ground to Catholic, Protestant and Nonconformist, to drinker and to teetotaller, to lettered and to unlettered and—to put an old phrase to modern use—to the gentle and the simple alike. It is the only place in which all folk can meet on an equal footing and be equally at home and equally at ease. All other meeting places—chapels and the like, or pubs and the like—are the home ground of one or other of the 104 social, religious and economic groups that make up the rural community. None of them of itself promotes the sense of community and interdependence which is by far the most precious attribute of a rural village. And, my Lords, what a rare thing and how precious is such a sense of community and interdependence in this day and age. Is it not precisely for that which the leaders of both the main Parties in another place have been so loudly crying for the last few months? Does not its absence lie at the heart of our present national malaise? Is it not, where it is still to be found, something to protect and shelter like the embers of a dying fire? I believe that it is, and I hope that your Lordships will agree with me.
Having said that, I do not wish to suggest that this Bill is necessarily the way in which that problem, so identified, can be solved in its present form. There are problems and they are several; and they are not, except at first sight, superficial. I shall mention only three, and that briefly because they have been touched upon already. In the first place, there is the difficulty of establishing definitions—of establishing who were the original benefactors of an endowment and what was, and what is now, the community and whether they are co-terminous still. Was that community, for instance, principally a congregation or a population? And what happens if two ecclesiastical parishes have been merged and the administrative and secular parishes have not?
In the second place, we have the difficulty of establishing values. I believe that the duties laid upon the Secretary of State in the top paragraph on the second page of this Bill—namely, establishing the relative values of donations made perhaps 100 or 150 years ago—would call upon the resources of an economic historian of tremendous power; and one could be sure that there would be another economic historian, and only one, with diametrically opposed views to deal with him when he made his statement. Therefore I think that this is a very difficult field.
In the third place, we have the difficult moral problem—it has been treated hitherto in this debate as a legal problem—of what I would call breach of trust. If, as is usually the case, the 105 school was built and endowed to provide a local community with elementary education under the supervision of the Church of England, then it can be argued that to sell the school to the highest bidder, with unrestricted use—that is crucial to this Bill—and to use the cash so raised to further the cause of a similarly supervised school on a larger scale and at a greater distance will still benefit the community and will carry out the educational intentions of the benefactors as well. It can further be argued, and with force, that to forgo the maximum capital benefit of the sale by selling it at existing use values only, and to restrict the benefit to the local community to non-educational activities, would be a breach of trust in two senses. It would be a failure to maximise capital and it would be a failure to extend the sphere of influence of the Church in education at a time when its influence is, I believe, sorely needed.
My Lords, not all village schools were church foundations, but we have here a widely applicable and a nice balance of interest. On the one hand, we have the needs of the village as a rural and increasingly isolated community. Those needs, let us face it, are shared by the parish church since we do not today countenance jumble sales, let alone whist drives, in the chancel and since it is very expensive to heat the whole church for occasional and administrative functions. Quite apart from that, how useful it is pastorally for the rector or vicar to be able to meet members of his parish who are not of his communion, on equal terms and equal footing on neutral ground. On the other hand, of course, there is a great need for capital to cater for the education of children who would have been taught in that very school had it not been closed as a result of a recent and, I think, unfortunately pursued vogue for concentrating elementary (that is to say primary) education in larger and larger and more and more distant units. That is another subtle attack on the sense of community that I mentioned earlier on. The selling of half a dozen Victorian schools for conversion into dwellings is one way of financing Church-sponsored education that arises as a result for the village commuter school children.
So, my Lords, there is a problem and there are difficulties obstructing its solu- 106 tion, and I do not think that solution is entirely resolved or presented in this Bill as it stands. If this were the first time that a debate in your Lordships' House had directed the attention both of the Department and of the General Synod to it, I should be content to let matters rest while they reflected. But my noble friend Lord Clifford of Chudleigh embarked upon this Bill in October, 1973. It has had its fourth First Reading and this is its third Second Reading debate, and I should not like to see the noble Lord, Lord Clifford of Chudleigh, going down for the third time.
I doubt whether the Government wish either to be, or to apear to be entirely obstructive in this matter and I am certain that the Church do not. Indeed, I am certain that what the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Manchester called "denominational selfishness" is not a motive which would be imputed. But I think inertia is one that is very likely to be laid as a charge at the doors of the Church, if they are not careful. Therefore I would propose to your Lordships, although the Bill in its present shape is not capable of resolving the problem, that we give it a Second Reading. We already know from remarks made yesterday by the noble Lord, Lord Wells-Pestell, that the pressure of Parliamentary business is such that amendments to the Social Security Amendment Bill would put its completion back beyond the Recess, and since then we have had an addition of business resulting from the Defence Review Statement. There can therefore be no great hurry to rush this little Bill through all its stages, and the proper thing to do, I believe, perhaps with the initiative of the Minister, is for those representing the Church and those representing a rural interest—and here I think one wants perhaps to reflect upon the Council for the Preservation of Rural England, or the Parish Councils Association or some similar body—and of course the redoubtable noble Lord, Lord Clifford of Chudleigh, himself, to consult together and produce either an improvement on this Bill or a substitute for it, probably of a legislative nature as the right reverend Prelate suggested, but quite possibly in the form of a Concordat.
In that light I think we can proceed to better things and to the benefit of a great many communities. To reject the 107 Bill now would be a great error; it would remove from the administrative machinery, both temporal and spiritual, the pressure which alone makes it turn smoothly, and would condemn perhaps a dozen more village schools beyond reprieve. There I will close my remarks, except to welcome the introduction of this Bill by my noble friend Lord Clifford of Chudleigh, and to wonder whether he was wise in his passionate claims in favour of justice on behalf of Saxons in the face of Normans, or whether he should have reflected on the Norman origins of his own family.
§ 4.43 p.m.
Lord HAWKEMy Lords, I apologise for not having put my name down to speak, but matters have occurred during the course of the debate on which I should like to comment. I am speaking as one who was for ten years the chairman of a diocesan board of finance of a semi-rural, semi-urban area, and was in receipt of much obloquy from parishes of the nature of my noble friend's parish, on which he based his speech. Most of us in the Church of England—but not all—believe that the retention of Church schools is of very great importance, because by retaining the Church schools the governors have the power to appoint the teachers and they have hopes that they can appoint teachers who are Christians and who will remain Christians. Therefore, they want to keep as many school places as possible in Church hands, even when streamlining and rearranging by the local education authority is taking place. The State pays a very large proportion of the capital sum for any new schools which are erected, but the Church, if it wishes to retain its interest, has to produce a fraction. I cannot remember the precise amount—I think that in my day it was 20 per cent.—and they are dependent upon only two sources of income. There is the schools pool, into which all such sales as the noble Lord has spoken about are put, and the quota which is levied on all the parishes of the diocese and which is met with a series of groans from most parishes.
If there were widespread action to sell the village schools to the villagers and so on at below market price, instead of 108 selling them at the top market price, which has produced a very valuable source of revenue indeed in the diocese of Chichester for the schools fund, then the schools pool would be very much more deficient that it is at the moment. Speaking for the one with which I had something to do, we were in a constant state of acute penury of debt. I dare say that the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Manchester had plenty of money up there but it did not exist in Sussex.
I think that the proper remedy for this is for the village which wants to keep its buildings with a change of user to make arrangements to buy at what could be considered a reasonable market price and possibly get help from the diocese to pay by instalments. It would be perfectly possible in some cases, if the capital amount was not too big, for the diocese to lend the amount free of interest on condition that it was paid back over a period of, say, ten years, by equal instalments. That would meet the least bad of all worlds because the schools pool would get this money over a period of years and the parish would have an easy method of re-paying for it. I believe it would be a mistake to pass this Bill because it would deal a serious blow to the schools pool, at all events in the more rural diocese.
§ 4.48 p.m.
§ Lord CLIFFORD of CHUDLEIGHMy Lords, in summing up may I pick up a few points which have been made by other speakers. Starting with the noble Lord, Lord Hawke, I really do not think he realises the situation in which so many of these small villages find themselves.
§ Lord CLIFFORD of CHUDLEIGHVery well. Does the noble Lord suggest that there is an alternative place for the people of the village to meet? Does he suggest that a hamlet of 60 families can afford to buy a new hall even if they have obtained the money by means of a loan?
Lord HAWKEMy Lords, the noble Lord is entirely misunderstanding me. He is suggesting that they should buy it at some special price; I am suggesting that they should buy this building at a more 109 or less market price and borrow the money from the diocese and then repay by instalments.
§ Lord CLIFFORD of CHUDLEIGHMy Lords, I think the noble Lord, Lord Hawke, is missing my point, which is that in this case and in hundreds of others which I have in my file, the one and only village meeting place is (or was) the original school which was built by the local population. We have the list, we know the percentage they paid and we know what the contributions were. It seems completely unjust to the local villager that this hall, which over the years he has considered to be his own, because he, his father and grandfather before him had paid for it and had considered the hall as being theirs already, should be paid for again. The argument put forward is that they should now go and buy the hall again, having already provided it. I really think that is missing the point.
My Lords, if I may now turn to what was said by the noble Lord, Lord Elton, I greatly appreciated the way in which he finished, because it was exactly the same way, I think he will agree, in which I ended my own speech. Since I first introduced this Bill, I have recognised that it contains imperfections. But I wanted to achieve the object. I have had support from inside and outside the House. All I have asked of successive Governments—and this has been asked for by other noble Lords as well as the noble Lord, Lord Sandford—is that we should get together and produce something which would have the effect we are aiming for; that is, that we do not lose our small local centres. The noble Lord said that there were difficulties in definition. But I say that in our case we know exactly what was contributed by whom. I should have thought it was easy enough to say, "Right, if it was 100 per cent. then, it is 100 per cent. now; if it was 50 per cent. then, it is 50 per cent. now".
My Lords, I return to the question of what has been spent on the buildings since the 1944 Act, when they were taken over by the local authority. The village has paid rates, and part of these rates has been spent on upkeep, so I do not think there is any difficulty there. Turning to what was said by the right reverend 110 Prelate the Bishop of Manchester, I noticed that he made reference to the episode of April 2. One of the Bishops sat next to me at tea afterwards. I was glad to know that, no matter what was said in Hansard, on the whole the Bishops realised our predicament. Fundamentally, they were only saying what they were told to say, to keep hold of this gratuitous gift that arose from the 1944 Act. I would say to the right reverend Prelate that an urban community would not want to take advantage of a Bill like this. The operative word is "may".
My Lords, we have heard many times from the Minister phrases like, "We are sorry"; "We are full of sympathy", and, "We have no use for it so we must turn it down". What is suggested now by the noble Lord, Lord Elton—and it was suggested before him by the noble Lord, Lord Sandford, and before that by the noble Lord, Lord Raglan—is that we must save these local centres. Why cannot we get together? Why will they not get together? Why will they not allow some meeting whereby we can put forward a workable Bill, or find some other way of achieving the object? There are many small communities in the country who are, or may be, in danger in the future of losing their own village meeting centre if the present system is allowed to continue.
One reference was made to the question of trusts. Surely it is still educational, adult education particularly; and surely it is charitable because it is not run for a profit. It is religious, and religious denominational, if you like, in this and many other cases. Where else could the rector have his Sunday school? So I do not think it is going against the trust at all. I hope your Lordships will give this Bill another Second Reading. I have not pretended that it is perfect. I have taken advice. If there is anything wrong, if, as successive Ministers have said, they are in sympathy with what I am trying to achieve, then please do what the noble Lord, Lord Elton, suggested. But since I have not had that offer from the Government, I hope your Lordships will agree to give this Bill a Second Reading.
§ On Question, Bill read 2a, and committed to a Committee of the Whole House.