GIVEN a “significant difference of opinion” in the General Synod over the setting of parochial fees, the Archbishops’ Council has scheduled a fringe meeting to explore possible ways forward.
In 2023, the Synod carried an amended diocesan-synod motion from Blackburn which asked the Archbishops’ Council to “design, fund and implement a time-limited, regional trial of providing weddings free of all statutory fees” (News, 11 July 2023).
The following year, the Synod was told that, after “considerable work” by teams at Church House, it had “reluctantly been concluded that such a regional experiment cannot be designed in a way which could realistically provide the data intended and that attempting to do so would incur disproportionate effort, especially by the parish clergy, and cost. Alternative approaches to generating such data have proved to be dead-ends.”
The Archbishops’ Council published a paper last week setting out its thinking on the way forward. It suggests that there exists within tthe Synod “a significant difference of opinion whether the practice of nationally-set parochial fees should continue”. At a Synod meeting in 2019, the Bishop of Blackburn, the Rt Revd Philip North, launched a spontaneous “one-man rebellion”, calling for the abolition of fees (News, 1 March 2019). It was unsuccessful.
Four years later, members voted in favour of a draft order capping the increase in fees at five per cent rather than in line with the Consumer Price Index (CPI), which stood at 9.9 per cent (News, 17 February 2023). In 2024, this was extended until the end of 2026 (News, 1 March 2024). In 2023, a private member’s motion calling on the Council to set the fees for funeral services at nil was signed by “very few” members before lapsing, the paper says.
The current annual income from parochial fees is estimated at about £70 million a year, of which diocesan boards of finance receive just over one third and PCCs just under two-thirds. The paper warns that “abolishing parochial fees would put considerable additional pressure on the diocesan economy directly and possibly indirectly via parish share”.
Setting out the thinking of the Diocesan Finances Review Steering Group, which considered fees as part of its work, the paper suggests that locally set fees or donations might not raise as much as the current arrangement, and that DBFs might lose out. The administrative burden, potential parliamentary opposition, and the “risk of reputational issues due to differences in fee levels” are also mentioned.
The paper concludes that it would be “wise to undertake some preparatory work with General Synod before deciding whether to embark on any legislative changes” and that a fringe meeting has been arranged to get a sense of members’ views.
A new Parochial Fees Order will need to be put to the Synod for consideration next year.
