Dr Rowan Williams says that government spending cuts threaten to remove vital services, particularly in rural areas, while church and voluntary groups are already at full stretch.
His comments, which followed private talks with the Prime Minister, reinforced his warning that the Big Society agenda must not be simply “an alibi” for public spending cuts. Dr Williams met Mr Cameron for talks with other faith leaders in Westminster earlier this week, although Lambeth Palace declined to give further details of the subjects discussed. Shortly after the election, Dr Williams said he could only give “two and a half cheers” for the Big Society because he was concerned that the plan to give voluntary and charitable organisations a greater role running public services meant the government was “washing its hands” of its responsibilities.
Speaking at a Church of England conference on faith in the countryside, Dr Williams suggested that his fears were proving well-founded. “Conversations earlier this week in Westminster suggested that a number of people driving the Big Society have not really thought through what the implication might be - certainly for the rural setting,” he said. Rural communities, in particular, face a “huge problem” with high rates of depression and suicide among farm workers, which will only worsen if funding for mental health services is withdrawn, he said. One in four mental health jobs in areas including Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire are said to be at risk.
Dr Williams said churches did not need to be told to get involved in helping their local communities, but required more government commitment and resources to expand their work. Voluntary groups are already taking up the burden of supporting rural residents who find themselves isolated, while “the Church can provide extremely significant support and help”.
“It is absolutely true that a certain amount of what gets talked about as Big Society shaped stuff is precisely what has been gong on already,” he said. “What it needs is not so much exhortation as capacity building. The challenge therefore is how do we get government – local and national – to build capacity in the countryside for groups like the churches to go on serving as they are already serving?”
Dr Williams’s comments come as the Church of England is bidding for £5 million of government money to run local community cohesion schemes to improve relations between different faith and ethnic groups. In a report on the Big Society, to be discussed at the General Synod in London later this month, officials suggested that rural churches should be given funds so that they can be adapted to house post offices and community meeting places.
The Archbishop’s intervention follows a series of statements from senior Church leaders raising concerns over the impact of spending cuts and questioning the Coalition’s commitment to the Big Society. Earlier this week, the Bishop of St Albans, the Rt Rev Alan Smith, warned that a new cap on housing benefit would make rural villages “monochrome and middle class” as the poor are forced out.
The Bishop of Leicester, the Rt Rev Tim Stevens, told the House of Lords that the housing benefit reforms would push vulnerable families into “townships” in undesirable areas on city fringes. “We do not create a fair society - let alone a ‘Big Society’ - by placing some of our fellow citizens beyond the reach of social solidarity,” he said.
