Acquiring Faculties

Loyal readers may recall, seven long years ago nearly, the saga of the refurbishment of Swanvale Halt church, retold in a series of posts on this blog: one, two, three, four, and yea five, the relaying of the floor, and the installation of new seating and lighting. The work itself was the easy part: it was waiting for permission to begin that was taxing to the nerves, not least because there was a wedding to host which eventually had to go somewhere else. The official authorisation for changes to church buildings is a thing called a faculty. In theory the bishop is the guardian of all church property in the diocese, and therefore grants permission for all works. In practice they delegate this to the properties department and, ultimately, the diocese's chief legal official, the Chancellor, who issues the final imprimatur on the bishop's behalf. Chancellor of a diocese is not a paid position, nothing so straightforward. In 2012 the Chancellor of Guildford was a former High Court judge who, so we were told, devoted one Saturday morning every fortnight (or it may have been a month) to reading faculty applications. One day in the midst of our knuckle-gnawing process of waiting I phoned up the legal office, the Registry, at their intimidating Gothic premises of 1 The Sanctuary next to the west door of Westminster Abbey to ask how long it might take. 'How long,' came the helpful reply, 'is a piece of string?' The benefit of the faculty process is that churches don't have to go through local authority planning permission for their works; the drawback is that there's a great deal of volunteer labour involved so it takes ages. 

The scope of works under the faculty system expanded considerably in the 19th century as bishops tried to stop their naughty Anglo-Catholic clergy from installing shrines to the Left Big Toenail of the Blessed Virgin and that sort of thing, or at least gave them legal grounds to remove them if they found out, but nowadays nobody cares very much about that and considerations of heritage, aesthetics and not leaving headaches for future churchwardens is more on the minds of the powers-that-be. To this end, in 2015 a new system of 'A' and 'B' items was introduced: 'A' refers to routine maintenance for which no permission is needed, 'B' small works which the local Archdeacon can authorise, and then there's everything else which still needs a full faculty.

The frustrations of this system led to a demand to be able to do it online and amazingly that is now happening, which leads me to the point of this post: a couple of weeks ago I went to a training morning at St Paul's, Dorking, about the online faculty system which strangely seems to be very good. 35 dioceses have bought into it over the last few years already so unusually Guildford is quite slow off the mark. You can upload all your documents to the database and then get emails whenever your application moves on or you need to do something. The only bit that seems not to be working is the final completion form the parishes should be sending on when they actually finish the work they applied for, as hardly anyone does, leading to most applications still being technically registered as 'live'. 'I could chase them up,' said the young fellow who led the training, 'but as there are - I'll check - ah, there you go - 19,864 at the moment, I rather doubt I'll find the time.'

The only unsettling thought is that I've been blithely telling successive Swanvale Halt churchwardens that 'the Archdeacon doesn't want to be bothered' about this or that, and while I remain convinced this is absolutely true, in fact we seem to be supposed to bother him, even if we're just having a 'List A' item done like cleaning the gutters. I may have to apply formally to regularise some of the teeny tiny items I've introduced to the church over the last nine-and-a-bit years.

Over coffee I wandered into the church, now a mainstream Evangelical establishment whose altar was brought forward in about 1980 and popped on a dais in 2005 when the pews were disposed of. The old chancel is, as so often, resplendent with encaustic tiles. But the real treasure, and surprise, is an amazing gold reredos now, as is often the case, remounted on a side wall. It was painted by a quite well-known artist called Ivon Hitchens in 1922: he later became a sort of abstract impressionist landscape painter and this, done as a young man, looks nothing at all like the work he later produced. In fact it has the look of something painted a generation earlier, with a Symbolist or Art-Nouveau tinge. Quite extraordinary, and I hope they had a faculty for it in 1922 or a bishop may yet come and hack it to shreds.