6 BCD SPECIAL REPORT ON HISTORIC CHURCHES 32nd ANNUAL EDITION NEWS REVIEW END OF THE ROAD FOR THE LISTED PLACES OF WORSHIP GRANT SCHEME For places of worship in the UK that are listed buildings, VAT recovery on works of conservation and repairs is set to end in March 2026. The Listed Places of Worship (LPoW) Grant Scheme has been a vital financial lifeline for historic religious buildings since its inception in 2001. It has allowed listed churches and other places of worship to recover the 20% VAT levied on eligible repair and maintenance works, helping congregations and communities to do so much more work with their hard-pressed funds. Since 2012, the scheme has been largely stable, with a maximum funding envelope of up to £42 million and actual expenditure averaging just over £29.7 million per year across the decade to 2023/24. That stability came to an abrupt end in January 2025, when Heritage Minister Chris Bryant announced that the scheme would be renewed for only one year, until March 2026. Meanwhile, the overall budget was reduced to £23 million and a new cap of £25,000 was placed on the amount any individual place of worship can claim in a single year. It has since been confirmed that there will be no replacement for the LPoW Grant Scheme, meaning that all listed places of worship throughout the UK will bear the full 20% VAT cost on repairs from 1 April 2026. For England, the blow has been softened by the announcement of a £92 million four year Places of Worship Renewal Fund, administered by Historic England. However, spread across four-years, this amounts to just £23 million annually – no more than the reduced LPoW Grant Scheme budget, and a real-terms cut given inflation. The implications for the conservation of historic places of worship in England are serious. As the National Churches Trust has pointed out, the new fund operates as a competitive capital grant rather than an automatic VAT reclaim. The new application process will be burdensome for churches, almost all of which rely entirely on volunteers, with no paid staff to navigate the competitive funding rounds. It also places larger, better-resourced congregations at an advantage over smaller rural parishes, which are often responsible for some of the most architecturally significant buildings. Because the UK government sees heritage as a devolved matter, no support is being offered for places of worship in Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales. At a time when many places of worship are already struggling to survive, it is hoped that further funding announcements will be made by the devolved assemblies and their statutory heritage bodies. MAINTAINING SCOTLAND’S CHURCHES PROJECT The SPAB’s highly successful training scheme for church maintenance training is to be expanded in Scotland for three years thanks to an annual £14,000 grant from Historic Environment Scotland. This will enable the SPAB to run six events per year across Scotland under its Maintaining Scotland’s Churches Project, and will support additional collaborative sessions with partner organisations. This project offers practical training to those responsible for caring for church buildings. It is open to churches of all denominations including the Church of Scotland in particular, which has the highest number of churches at risk. Croscombe, Somerset: small parish churches lack the resources to compete for grants and benefitted enormously from the simplicity of the LPoW Grant Scheme.
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MzI0Mzk=