Services funded by public money should be open to all, without alienating anyone.
The recent drive to contract out public services to faith groups risks undermining equal access.
Help us keep public services free from discrimination and evangelism.
The government is increasingly pushing for more publicly-funded services to be provided by religious organisations.
Many faith-based groups have carried out social service without imposing their beliefs. But religious groups taking over public service provision raises concerns regarding proselytising and discrimination.
65% of people have no confidence in church groups running crucial social provisions such as healthcare with only 2% of people expressing a lot of confidence.
Any organisations involved in delivering public services should be bound by equality law and restrictions on proselytisation.
Those advocating for faith organisations to take over more public services risk undermining these restrictions, which exist to protect both the public and third sector.
"We have concerns that some religious groups that seek to take over public services, particularly at local level, could pursue policies and practices that result in increased discrimination against marginalised groups, particularly in service provision and the employment of staff. Non-religious people and those not seen to confirm to the dominant ethos of a religious body, such as being in an unmarried relationship or divorced and being lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgendered, could find themselves subject to discrimination."
Unitarian Church (Submission to the Parliamentary Public Administration Select Committee about the Big Society agenda)
There are also concerns about faith-based mental health and pastoral care in public institutions, including chaplaincy programmes in the NHS and the armed forces. Where such services are funded by the state, they should not be organised around religion or belief.
Religious commentators are often keen to document the contribution of religious organisations to the third sector and social activism. But they fail to demonstrate why it should be the state's role to build this capacity or why local authorities shouldn't have legitimate concerns about religious groups running services.
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1. Write to your MP
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3. Join the National Secular Society
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Latest updates
City of London asks for secular message at official dinner
Posted: Thu, 5 Oct 2017 10:25
The City of London has asked the Lord Mayor's chaplain to give a religiously-neutral message, rather than a Christian grace, at an official dinner.
The City told the chaplain, Rev Canon Roger Royle, to give the message at a black tie event for the charitable Dragon Awards last week. The awards, which are held at the Mansion House, recognise corporate community involvement.
"[We] respect people of all religious beliefs and those who have none," said the City of London Corporation. "The note of thanks felt most appropriate for our audience as a celebration of London's diversity."
The National Secular Society welcomed the decision. "There is no justification for holding communal prayers at a non-religious public event," said communications officer Chris Sloggett.
At the dinner the toastmaster mistakenly said Rev Royle would give a grace. The priest then explained his instructions and read out some lines from the awards website.
Rev Royle told the Sunday Times that he disagreed with the decision. "I don't see why we didn't have a proper grace because the atmosphere of the evening was perfectly Christian," he said. "In the City… you've got to make sure God does get a look in". George Carey, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, said the chaplain should either have resigned or defied instructions and said grace.
Mr Sloggett said the Church's reaction to the decision had "shown, perhaps inadvertently, what the next logical step should be".
"It is indeed incongruous for Church officials to be delivering secular messages at public events. They have no qualifications for the job, and on the evidence of this dinner they throw an immature strop when they are asked to do it. But the answer to that should not be to reinstate religious messages – it should be to take the Church out of our public ceremonies altogether."
The event is the latest to spark debate on communal religious observance. Last week the NSS wrote to the Justice Secretary to ask him to scrap Judges' Services, where judges attend an Anglican service and pray for guidance fully robed, in their official capacity and during working hours. And last month Belfast's new Lord Mayor, Nuala McAllister, bucked a trend by not inviting anyone to say grace before her installation dinner. The NSS commended her decision.
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NSS calls for moratorium on Government funding of cathedrals
Posted: Tue, 16 May 2017 13:22
Following concerns raised by the National Secular Society, the UK spending watchdog has concluded that "improvements" were needed in the process the Government used to award vast sums of public money for cathedral repairs.
The National Audit Office criticisms related to assessing the extent to which the Church could fund the repairs without recourse to these grants, and a failure to provide agreed annual reports. The NSS is calling for these concerns to be resolved before any further funds are released.
The NSS wrote to the National Audit Office to highlight concerns about the Government's award of around £221 million since 2014 for repairs to places of worship, the vast majority to the Church of England. Cathedrals have received £40 million for repairs under the 'First World War Centenary Cathedral Repair Fund'.
The NSS said it recognised the need to maintain the country's architectural heritage, but sounded the alarm after conducting research revealing the cathedrals' substantial wealth. It asked the spending watchdog to investigate whether the cathedrals had demonstrated genuine financial need. Even excluding the massive funds at church and parish level, the CofE has estimated assets comfortably exceeding £10bn.
After investigating the grant process, the Audit Office has identified "a number of areas for improvement in the governance, operation and oversight of the Fund" which it has subsequently reported to the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS). The NAO has told them that there were "improvements that could have been made to bolster the process".
In response to the NSS's concerns about cathedrals' substantial wealth not being taken into account, the NAO acknowledged that it had "not seen evidence that sufficient information about the liquidity of cathedrals' investments was available to allow those assets to be assessed in determining their financial need." It also revealed, disturbingly, that "financial need is assessed less strictly" than necessity and heritage significance. The NSS will be pressing the DCMS to establish who authorised financial need to be assessed more laxly than the other criteria, and with what authority.
Despite the taxpayers' enormous generosity to the Church, the Church so far has shown no inclination to honour the minimal obligation of completing year-end reports for the Fund that it undertook in writing as part of grant agreement. The NAO requested these but they were not provided.
The Church has said it will be lobbying the government for another fund similar to the First World War Centenary scheme. The NSS has urged that any further funds be made conditional on the completion of outstanding reports for the current scheme and a convincing demonstration that the improvement in the governance, operation and oversight of the Fund called for by the NAO are put in place.
NSS Executive director Keith Porteous Wood wrote to the DCMS about these "disturbing shortfalls" and asking what steps had been taken by the DCMS to secure the required reports.
Mr Wood said: "We hope that the scrutiny of the National Audit Office will ensure that in future public money is only used to pay for the upkeep of the Church's historic and architecturally significant buildings where there is a demonstrable need for the state to step in and do so."
