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Communities and neighbourhoods

Faith Based Regeneration Network Conference

Date of speech	31 March 2009
Location	Friends House, Euston Road, London
Event summary	FbRN Annual Conference - 'Joining-Up-The-Dots'

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Draft text of the speech - may differ from the delivered version.

Thank you for inviting me today. The Faith Based Regeneration Network (FbRN) is an important partner for us at Communities and Local Government (CLG). And I really value this opportunity to engage with all of you - FbRN's grass roots membership.

I like your conference title - "Joining-Up-the-Dots". I understand this is partly about telling it how it is from the 'worm's eye view' - someone, somewhere in a faith community has made the comment:

"members of faith based groups can often feel like small insignificant dots on the landscape".

At least he or she didn't say 'blots on the landscape'.

An annual conference is a time for taking stock - for looking back and getting things in perspective. And then for looking forward - for fixing our eyes on a point a year or so ahead and figuring out how we're going to get there. On our own, it can feel as though we are just small dots on the landscape. But an event like this puts us in touch with one another - with our different strengths and resources and visions - it joins us up and helps us see how we can support one another to get where we want to go. Maybe we'll find we're more than the sum of our parts.

And I'm not just talking about you as local organisations - I'm talking about us in Government too. Perhaps more than ever before we're all becoming aware that the 'project' for a good society can only be achieved through mature, grown-up relationships between local communities and all the various aspects of the state. The different bits of Government have to join up - with one another … but perhaps even more important, they have to join up with what's happening on the ground, in neighbourhoods and communities everywhere.

Progress this year

Face-to-Face-and-Side-by-Side

Let's do some of the looking back over the past year, since your last annual conference. I hope you'll agree it's been a year of real progress. I'd even want to claim it's been an exceptional year - given that in July 2008 we published Face-to-Face-and-Side-by-Side, the national framework for inter faith partnership.

Faiths in Action Fund

By any standards this has to be a milestone. It's the first time Government has published a coordinated set of policies and programmes about working with faith communities. It includes the £4 million Faiths in Action fund to support local inter faith projects. We should be announcing the successful applications for the first round very soon.

Religious literacy and Faith and Community

It also includes commitments to important work to develop religious literacy training and to update guidance to local authorities about their engagement with local faith and inter faith groups. I'll say more about these later.

Regional strand of Face-to-Face-and-Side-by-Side

But I want to focus for the moment on the regional strand of Face-to-Face-and-Side-by-Side. This regional element of CLG's direct investment in inter faith activity is worth spelling out in a bit of detail. Why are we doing it? Today is a good time and place to explore it.

In most of the 9 English regions there was of course some kind of faith forum or network already in place. They differ widely in structure and in their 'stories' - how they came into being in the first place. This is right and proper. Regions are different and the forums have developed in response to the needs and pressures in their own region. In CLG we have no intention of trying to 'iron out' these differences through Face-to-Face-and-Side-by-Side. Quite the opposite. The regions are about devolution. Difference is what it's all about.

But we do want to try and make sure that there's similar access to resources across the country, and that each forum has the capacity to deliver a programme of work to support local inter faith activities. So we have allocated up to £70,000 for each forum for each of the 3 years of the current Spending Review period. We're just at the end of the first year.

Exactly how this is spent depends on the circumstances in the region. So the north west, for example, has just appointed a local inter faith development officer.

But money isn't everything! The other equally, if not more important investment at regional level is the support we've put in place through the Community Development Foundation (CDF). There is of course money involved here as well, because we've made funding available for CDF to employ someone to work with the forums in developing their work programmes.

But we didn't choose CDF by accident. CDF is one of the main national infrastructure organisations for the third sector. I hope you've anticipated the message - appointing CDF is about helping to position faith communities strategically within the third sector. It makes all the resources and experience of CDF - in capacity building, research, policy development and so on - directly available to the regional forums. And through the forums to groups at local level.

This message - about positioning faith communities within the third sector - may not sound very exciting, but we have to keep pushing it. My colleague, Lord Patel of Bradford, made an important statement about it last year. It's not in the world's most accessible place - you have to look in the Hansard record of debates in the House of Lords for 9 October! But a couple of sentences should do to drive the point home:

"Third-sector organisations are most often trusted by the people they work with, particularly the most vulnerable and marginalised. We want to draw on all the sector's strengths by working together in partnership. Once again, I stress how all that I have said about the third sector embraces faith groups, whose local rootedness means that they often demonstrate these strengths to a high degree."

But to return to the regional forums. There's also a 'forum of forums' - the English Regions Faith Forums Network, convened jointly by the Inter Faith Network and FbRN. The point is that we're well on course with pulling together the infrastructure that enables us all to work together from national to local levels. It makes communication quick and reasonably straightforward through the networks. It means there can be a more strategic approach to building capacity … to consultation … to engagement and so on.

Role of FbRN

This leads me back to my opening remark - about FbRN being such an important partner for us at CLG. Most of you will know that Doreen, FbRN's director, is a member of the Faith Communities Consultative Council at CLG. I co-chair the Council. We're just about to review its work. We'll want to try and make it a more effective body for getting the voice of faith communities into our thinking about policies and programmes. Through Doreen, FbRN's membership and their experience is at the table.

We depended on FbRN's capacity when we were developing Face-to-Face-and-Side-by-Side. FbRN did a substantial amount of the background research on the regional picture for us. And this was part of the wider process of consultation we undertook to inform the framework. We had a huge response - not only from faith groups - and all this confirmed our view about the very wide range of faith communities' involvement in public life.

Wider role of faiths

We are of course interested in the role of faith communities in delivering services. We're also interested in their role in supporting community cohesion. But faiths are not limited to these areas. They contribute to social capital, to community development. And your commitment to social justice is second to none. There is a rich diversity among our faith communities - not just in the variety of faith traditions, but in the ways they contribute to society and especially to local communities.

Faith buildings paper

Government wants to support faith groups to build on this and do more, but we know there are barriers - not least a lack of resources. Last week we published Churches and Faith Buildings: Realising the Potential. Copies are available here today - and it will be used in one of the workshops.

As the foreword says, the paper brings together for the first time in one place a list of all the relevant Government funding streams, as well as capacity building resources. It also pulls together a note on all the guidance available about local partnership working. And it clearly sets out the valuable, and often unrecognised, role faith communities, and their buildings, can play as part of the local third sector. Your buildings are significant community assets. It's about us all working together to make sure that everything you bring - from deep personal commitment to bricks and mortar - is translated into practical benefits for local people.

Partnership working

An important theme in the faith buildings paper is local partnership working. We know this can be very challenging. A couple of the other commitments from Face-to-Face-and-Side-by-Side will help with this:

• the first is updating the Faith and Community guidance, originally published by the Local Government Association in 2002. Good working relationships with local authorities and Local Strategic Partnerships are crucial for faith groups. The old guidance is out of date, and a working group is revising it. There's already been a conference mainly for the public sector and the group is now planning a national conference for faith communities early next year.
• the second is the proposal for developing a programme of religious literacy training. Again we all know how important it is that officials in public agencies should have the skills and knowledge they need to work well with faith communities. Some do, some don't. It's patchy. So a multi faith group is tackling this. CLG has already provided some funding to help and has offered to support the project further (not necessarily with funding) when the working group feels the time is right.

G20 and economic downturn

I've said this is an occasion for looking at the past and the future. What about the present? On Thursday this week the G20 economic summit takes place in London. You won't need me to tell you that the economic downturn has had a serious affect on the lives of many individuals and local communities. It would be easy to assume that the issues that will be examined at the London Summit should be left to the G20 leaders and their economic advisers. Easy, but wrong.

As I speak there's a public meeting taking place in St Paul's Cathedral, hosted by the Bishop of London, entitled My Word is My Bond? [note the question mark] Rebuilding Trust - the G20 and beyond. Many will feel as though the institutions they used have confidence in have breached that bond of trust. Now more than ever, people are looking to where they can find certainty, hope, and guidance. This is what local faith communities can offer. And that is to say nothing of the practical support many such communities already give: whether in terms of their delivery of services, or their ability to point people in the right direction to access those services elsewhere.

Inter Faith Week

But I want to end with Inter Faith Week - which we announced last week. This should help raise the profile of things you're doing locally. The Week will run from 15 to 21 November with a national launch the week before. It's being facilitated by the Inter Faith Network and CLG but will be community-led, with local people and groups of different backgrounds holding their own events to highlight work going on to promote understanding between people of different faiths and beliefs.

Inter Faith Week should be a great opportunity to show how all the things I've been talking about can make a real difference in the places where you live. It's a reality check, if you like, for all of us. There shouldn't be any community anywhere where Inter Faith Week doesn't tell a good story about the things faith groups are doing - and doing together.

So that's where I leave you - with encouragement to make Inter Faith Week happen in your community. It's a chance to put all the things you do in the public eye. I'm looking forward to hearing that Inter Faith Week is successful in getting others involved too who aren't already engaged.

Thank you again for inviting me today.