THE subject of parishes in areas of deprivation and the Church Commissioners’ part in supporting them returned to the General Synod on Tuesday in a debate on Lowest Income Communities (LInC) funding.
Amid warnings a couple of funding crisis within the poorest communities, members voted in favour of an amended motion that called on the Commissioners and the Archbishops’ Council to review the formula and processes used to distribute the funding, set to total £133 million in the present triennium.
The debate also heard from senior leaders who rejected the figures produced by the national church institutions (NCIs) which set out the quantity of LInC funding that had gone to probably the most deprived parishes.
On Wednesday, the Bishop of Blackburn, the Rt Revd Philip North, called on the NCIs to “withdraw their data, apologise, and reissue”.
The original motion from Chester diocesan synod expressed regret that 12 mainland dioceses had received no LInC funding, “despite containing 268 parishes which can be among the many 25 per cent most socially deprived”. It called for a review of the formula, but specified that the geographical unit used to evaluate need needs to be the parish, not the diocese.
Established in 2017, LInC funding supports dioceses in sustaining ministry in socio-economically deprived areas. It is currently allocated to twenty-eight dioceses using a formula based on average income of diocesan residents, income deprivation, and population. Dioceses have reported that the funding supports at the least 1700 parishes, “and that a lot of them wouldn’t have their current level of stipendiary clergy without that support” (News, 14 February 2025).
Moving the motion, the Revd Christopher Blunt (Chester), a rector in a Stockport parish that’s among the many one per cent most deprived within the country, described LInC funding because the “cornerstone of the Church of England’s commitment to the poor”. But he drew attention to a “blind spot”: the proven fact that ineligible dioceses contained parishes in areas of maximum deprivation.
The “generous” parish-share system in Chester meant that his parish was asked for less than 45 per cent of a regular parish share, while wealthy ones paid as much as 145 per cent. But this was still hard to fulfill “if you find yourself a part of a parish where numerous the congregation live and giving out of Universal Credit or PIP [Personal Independence Payment] or state pension”.
The motion — “born out of frustration” — was “modest”, he suggested. “To say I’m disenchanted by the response is an understatement.”
The amendment was brought by Carl Hughes, who chairs the Archbishops’ Council’s Finance Committee. It repeated the decision for a review of the formula and processes of distribution, but “as a part of the broader review of the Church’s funding framework for ministry” and with no stipulations in regards to the shape of the review when it comes to data sets or mechanisms.
Mr Hughes expressed concern that the approach set out within the motion “moves decisions about how best to support local parishes from diocesan leadership to national church bodies. It would also remove accountability over such funding from diocesan synods. . .
“In my opinion, the usage of a national formula to find out local deployment is completely not desirable and indicative of a level of centralisation that many on this chamber complain about repeatedly.”
Any review must have in mind the resources that dioceses themselves could deploy, “and mustn’t weaken the core virtue of mutuality of support amongst parishes inside a diocese”, he argued.
A paper provided by the Synod’s Secretary-General, William Nye, warned that, unamended, the motion would “shift funding to some non-LInC dioceses but reduce allocations to current recipients unless overall funding increases”.
Concern about this was expressed in speeches against the motion from representatives of dioceses currently in receipt of the funding.
Bishop North said that the unamended motion risked putting “at threat” the “growing vibrancy of the urban Church”, by reducing disbursements to existing recipients. It also undermined the principle that wealthier areas should support more deprived ones, he said. “It signifies that funding will flow into wealthier dioceses on the direct expense of more deprived dioceses.”
But other speakers argued in favour of accelerating the LInC-funding total. The Church’s 2024 accounts showed that this was reasonably priced, Emma Robarts (St Albans) said.
“Money is in regards to the only problem the Church doesn’t have,” she said. LInC funding was “the difference between ministry surviving and ministry collapsing in places where the Church of England is commonly the last functioning institution”.
She went on to precise concern that a debate on disbursing funding to dioceses, including support for local stipendiary ministry — a response to the Synod’s request that or not it’s enabled to precise its view early in the subsequent triennium — was not as a result of happen until 2027.
“This is classic administrative capture: figuring out their answer before we’re allowed to debate it,” she said. “The problem is immediate and urgent. . . We are not looking for the legacy of Vision and Strategy to be the death through neglect of the parishes.”
Andrew Gray (St Edmundsbury & Ipswich) suggested that the feeding of the five thousand “wouldn’t have happened had General Synod been involved”. He detected, somewhat than faith and hope, “fear that if we pass this something will go fallacious”.
The motion was simply asking the Commissioners to review the formula and have in mind two sets of information. Yet “anyone would think from among the responses that what it was actually asking for is the nuclear access codes.” The Church had “a funding crisis in our poorest communities” while the Commissioners were “sitting on record amounts”.
Guidance from the Archbishops’ Council states that LInC funding should primarily be utilized in parishes within the 25 per cent lowest-income areas. But, last yr, Mr Hughes told the Synod that only two-thirds of this was reaching parishes on this category — and he found this “disturbing” (News, 14 February 2025). The latest figure is 73 per cent.
This yr, “light-touch” reporting had been introduced for dioceses. In response to a written query from the Revd Marcus Walker (London), the Archbishops’ Council had published a table showing the proportion of LInC allocated to the 25 per cent most deprived parishes within the last financial yr.
This suggested a big variation: the proportion was lower than 50 per cent in six dioceses and 100 per cent in others. But dioceses and bishops have challenged the figures. “Many of us bishops don’t recognise them,” the Archbishop of York told the talk.
The Archdeacon of Ashford, the Ven. Darren Miller, said that he had been “horrified” by the figure in Canterbury diocese, but had been told by the diocesan office that only 8.31 per cent went to parishes outside the 25 per cent. “The stats don’t sustain with reality on the bottom.”
A diocesan spokesman said on Wednesday that the figures “don’t appear to reflect the distributions to areas of deprivation in Kent or the work done to support mission and ministry in those areas”.
The table suggested that, within the diocese of St Edmundsbury & Ipswich, 64 per cent of the funding went to parishes outside the 25 per cent.
On Wednesday, the diocesan secretary, Gary Peverley, said that, “as a primarily rural diocese, the economic makeup of our communities differs greatly to many other regions of the country.”
In 2024, he said, no parishes inside the diocese had a population inside the most-deprived 10 per cent nationally, while eight parishes had a population inside the 25-per-cent most-deprived. Two of those parishes had been allocated 36 per cent of the funding, while the rest had been allocated “with an understanding of local context, including the degrees of local deprivation, other forms of economic support provided by the diocese, the financial health of the parish and population size”.
The diocesan secretary for Carlisle, Derek Hutton, said that he had “no idea what methodology has been used to reach at this conclusion”, and that data showed that every one of funding was “consistently targeted at Mission Communities that substantially consist of parishes in the highest 25-per-cent most deprived”.
A spokesman for the diocese of Hereford said that the table didn’t “accurately reflect” the diocesan board of finance’s data submission to the Church of England, and that 100 per cent of the funding went to parishes within the most-deprived 25 per cent nationally.
In Truro, a spokeswoman said that the totality of LInC had been allocated to deaneries “who then used it in the perfect approach to support their local context as set out of their plans. When we report back to the National Church, where parishes are listed, that’s where they’re allocating money of their stipends to those working in areas of drawback.” She drew attention to the social motion under way in deaneries, including work by Church Action on Poverty centres and foodbanks.
In 2022, the diocese reported that it had used LInC to plug its operating-budget deficit, and set out plans to redirect this to work in deprived communities, with half the sum supporting stipends in these areas (News, 2 June 2023).
The table suggested that, within the diocese of Blackburn, 22 per cent of the funding went to parishes outside the 25 per cent. “We neither recognise nor accept that data,” Bishop North said on Wednesday.
The diocese had been certainly one of the primary to be sure that every penny went to probably the most deprived parishes, and “hard evidence” may very well be provided, he said. “Those parishes see exactly how much they’re receiving on their parish-share certificate and, following consultation, agreed that a small percentage be held back for pioneering projects in urban communities.”
When challenged, the NCIs had said that they used a distinct measure of deprivation, he said. But, even using this, the diocese could discover only two parishes not counted as deprived when this measure was used.
“There is now a serious charge on the general public record that the diocese of Blackburn will not be using LInC as intended, and we wholly refute that,” he said. “The use and abuse of LInC matters an excessive amount of for people to be reaching conclusions on the premise of unreliable data. We call on the NCIs to withdraw their data, apologise, and reissue.”
On Wednesday, Mr Hughes spoke of the challenge of processing data from dioceses that “do the whole lot barely in another way”. The NCIs had had a really short time wherein to produce the reply to Fr Walker’s query, he said.
Some of the confusion had been attributable to the proven fact that among the dioceses’ answers had pertained, not only to LInC funding, but to separate transitional funding, he said. The table was “correct, but kind of misrepresents the situation”.
It can be “fallacious to conclude” that LInC was not going to the most-deprived communities, even though it remained the case that not all of it did so. The latest reporting system meant that this issue wouldn’t be repeated, but he apologised “for any confusion that we’ve caused”.
