EXCLUSIVE: The Government has cut vital VAT relief on church repairs, forcing small towns and villages to spend tens of thousands on conservation projects.
Parishes have been forced to fundraise tens of thousands of pounds for church repairs (Image: Joseph Raynor/Reach PLC)
Parishes around the country are struggling to shoulder the extortionate costs of upkeep England’s Christian churches, with volunteers pleading with the Government to commit more money towards their preservation. Unlike countries such as Austria and Denmark, which levy opt-out church taxes on their citizens, England’s world-class portfolio of ecclesiastical buildings are financially dependent on their volunteer church wardens and the generosity of their dwindling congregations. While the struggle to cover the high costs of maintenance work is nothing new, wardens including Andrew Fearn, who oversees the Grade-I listed St Mary Magdalene in Newark, Nottinghamshire, have at least been able to claim VAT back on repairs over £1,000 through the Listed Places of Worship scheme since 2001.
That changed after the scheme fell victim to Chancellor Rachel Reeves’ frenzied cost-cotting efforts in the spring, however, with its total annual allowance almost halved from £43 million to £23 million, and a new spending cap of £25,000 introduced for individual claims. Andrew, 74, had just begun a £4.5 million renovation project at St Mary’s, and assumed he would be able to reclaim £7,000 from the Government. “Instead, we were left with a £600,000 deficit,” he told the Express. “It felt like the rug had been pulled out from under us.”
Andrew Fearn said the Government’s cost-cutting change ‘pulled the rug out’ from under him (Image: St Mary’s Newark)
St Mary’s church in Newark had just begun a £4.5 million renovation when the cuts came into effect (Image: Joseph Raynor/Reach PLC)
St Mary’s church in Newark had just begun a £4.5 million renovation when the cuts came into effect (Image: Joseph Raynor/Reach PLC)
The parish was eventually able to make ends meet by drastically scaling back its refurbishment plans – which included roof and masonry repairs, heating installations and a new toilet and cafe area. It was only able to do so through extensive fundraising and a grant from the National Lottery Heritage Fund.
But Andrew’s struggle to find enormous funds at short notice speaks to a larger issue facing churches across England – the cost of repairing and maintaining some of the world’s oldest religious buildings, many dating back to the Anglo Saxon period, falling on the shoulders of well-meaning volunteers, with no direct financial backing from the church or state.
Felicity Pinder, 85, had just raised £19,000 for an organ refurbishment in the Wiltshire village of Fovant, largely helped by a generous donation from someone whose family had lived in the area for decades, when she learned of a damp patch in the church that was likely to cost thousands more pounds.
“We don’t know the exact amount, but I’ve a feeling it will be much harder to fundraise for,” she said. “We have money in the reserves, but it’s an uncertain position to be in. The organ was a recognisable, 100-year-old part of the church. A damp patch in the roof is more fundamental, perhaps, but it’s less attractive as a fundraising campaign.”
85-year-old warden Felicity Pinder is preparing to fundraise ‘thousands of pounds’ for repairs (Image: Felicity Pinder)
Peter Guy, 75, warden of Holy Trinity Church in Bowerchalke, Hampshire, also described the VAT relief on a £40,000 repair project to the Grade-II listed building last year as “life-saving” and warned that scaling back the Listed Places of Worship scheme would accelerate church closures – which already average 20 a year.
“As well as having to find money for repairs, we pay the Church of England an annual parish share, to cover the costs of having a vicar and so on,” he explained. “The amount each area pays is judged by its size, but it’s not an insignificant sum. We’re relatively small [with a population of 221 in 2021] and ours was around £17,000 this year. That’s about the total of all our collections, pooled together, with nothing to spare for emergency repairs.”
In the tiny parish of Kington St Michael in Chippenham, which has a population of roughly 700, the burden of paying thousands of pounds in repair costs, alongside gas, electricity and the parish share, now falls on just 18 pensioners.
Alison Greenhalgh, 63, has been forced to think outside the box to raise money for large-scale repairs, including to the church porch, which total approximately £65,000. She has so far planned organ concerts, village suppers and an event where teddy bears were parachuted off the church roof.
“It’s a lot of responsibility,” Alison said. “We’re very proud of our 800-year-old church, but it’s becoming harder and harder to make ends meet. Historically, people would have made donations each month, but as our congregation gets older, that pot inevitably shrinks. We definitely feel a huge weight on our shoulders. There’s such a legacy here – we don’t want to be ones who let it fall apart.”
The Kington St Michael Church is in need of £65,000 worth of repairs (Image: Google/Cleeve Amos)
Even the growing trend of spirituality among young people hasn’t offset the crisis. While a survey by OnePoll found that 62% of Gen Z identify as spiritual in some regard, younger generations appear to be eschewing the church, and its associations of outdated institutionalism, for increasingly abstract ideas of faith.
A study from the Bible Society found that as Christian self-identification shrunk from 46% to just under 40% between 2021 and 2024, the proportion of 18 to 24-year-olds who thought there was probably or definitely a god or “some higher power” rose from 28% to 45%.
The trend of young people taking solace in religion from a turbulent world certainly isn’t being felt on the ground in rural England, where often inexperienced retiree wardens are forced to grapple with huge shortfalls, and often don’t know where to look for help.
“There’s a lot of bureaucracy churches have to deal with,” said Ben Sims, head of fundraising and public affairs at the National Churches Trust (NCT), a charity set up to support parishes, including by helping wardens manage accounts and apply for grants.
“It can be dull, difficult and confusing for people,” he added. “It’s not what they sign up for when they take the role, and they often aren’t aware of the funds available. We’ve handed out over 300 grants, totalling £3 million, to churches in the last year, and we’re continuing to grow in response to the demand. But this is a fully-fledged crisis, and more support is desperately needed.”
Despite growing secularism – with church attendance among adults falling by a third in 15 years – churches remain hugely important community resources. Research from the NCT shows that services offered at churches, including food banks and youth groups, take a huge amount of pressure off the NHS – delivering support that would otherwise cost the state £8.4 billion.
Misconceptions about who pays for church upkeep persists among the wider public, however. While the Church of England runs grant schemes for parishes across the country, the hundreds of millions of pounds in its reserves are allocated to its wider mission, rather than on-the-ground work. This has included £190 million directed to a Net Zero carbon programme and £20 million to racial justice initiatives.
“The way the church is set up means it can’t directly spend money on this kind of thing,” Ben said. “What we really want is for the Government to step up and take ownership of the problem, before it worsens even further.
“The Listed Places of Worship scheme should be restored to what it was last year, and renewed on a permanent basis. It currently operates year-to-year, so there’s no guarantee that it will continue in any form beyond next March.”
“Ideally, there’d also be a wider, three-pronged approach to funding, involving the Church, the state and private philanthropy, to solve what is essentially a heritage disaster,” he added. “This is the decline of traditional community centres. Libraries have gone. Pubs have gone. Are churches next?”
“We need to change the way people think about churches,” adds Alison Milbank, of the Save the Parish campaign, a grassroots organisation pressuring the church and state to stop siphoning resources away from struggling parishes.
“These are buildings of great cultural and architectural importance. They’re places of communal memory, as well as communal worship,” she added. “But any attempts to future-proof these buildings – by installing heating or creating spaces for coffee mornings or film nights – have to be made by the towns and villages, who have no money to spare.”
The financial burden of church conservation falls on small communities across England (Image: St Mary’s Newark)
A spokesperson for the Church of England said: “We are deeply grateful to our dedicated volunteers and clergy who work so hard to ensure that church buildings remain in good repair, sustainable and welcoming to all.
“The national Church of England advocates on behalf of parish churches and cathedrals. We are working in partnership with the build heritage sector and other denominations to press the Government to make the Listed Places of Worship Grant Scheme permanent and for the current cap of £25,000 to be lifted on claims.
“We support church buildings in a number of other ways, including the £11 million ‘Buildings for Mission’ programme, which funds dioceses to pay for small scale ‘stitch in time’ repairs for churches. It also funds a network of Church Buildings Support Officers, who give advice on the management and conservation of churches, as well as community use, alongside worship.
“A new expanded £5 million fund administered by the Church of England is also providing grants directly to parishes to help pay for the conservation of special objects in churches such as stained glass, paintings, bells, organs and clocks.
“The Net Zero programme is saving parishes thousands of pounds on their energy bills every year and helping them to become warmer environments over the winter, in many cases through small scale and relatively inexpensive changes to make their buildings more energy efficient.”
A spokesperson for the Department for Culture, Media and Sport said: “Listed places of worship are important to faith communities and provide a range of services to the wider public. Many of them are architecturally and historically significant.
“Alongside other funding available for listed places of worship via DCMS and our arm’s length bodies, such as £100 million provided by the National Lottery Heritage Fund between 2023 and 2026, the Listed Places of Worship Grant Scheme aims to enable religious organisations to claim grants covering eligible VAT costs paid towards repairs and renovations.”
