The governments benefit cap policy has been defeated in the House of Lords. An amendment made by a bishop passed 252:237 with support by Labour (who recently said that they support the idea of capping benefits).
If this amendment stays then families will continue to receive benefits of more than £26,000 (possibly as high as £50,000 for some families), allowing them to live in houses that the people who pay taxes to fund those benefits can't afford for themselves. Many of those homes are in expensive areas of London where normal tax payers could never afford to live.
These people on welfare have their rents paid for them and have no incentive to hold down rents. That pushes up rents for everybody else and prices working people out of homes.
The Church of England bishops (who are the only church to have special representation in the unelected House of Lords) receive pay and pensions from the Church Commissioners investment fund. This fund owns a lot of residential property in London and benefits from higher private sector rents.
According to the latest published accounts, the Bishops over £27 million took from the investment fund in 2010. That is more than 4 times what was spent on Cathederals (£7 million) and almost half of what was spent on all the rest of the Clergy (£46.8 million). Note this is not the only money that goes to Bishops - the suffragan bishops costs are paid for by the dioceses.
They also break down how that money was spent. There are 113 bishops in the Church of England and the payroll part of the bill came to £5.1 million, so each Bishop cost the Church over £45,000 per year on average. Now those are averages - over £1.4 million of that goes to the Arch Bishop of Canterbury and his staff. The Church Commissioner's report states that their highest paid worker is paid £300,000 + benefits so presumably a lot of that goes to one man.
No wonder they think that it is OK for the tax payers to spend £26,000 on benefits for the "poor" - they take far more than that themselves.
You would think that at that level they could afford to pay for their own homes, but the Church of England spent a further £5.4 million on their houses, offices (which are often the same) and gardens, so they spent a further £47,000 on average on their housing costs.
I guess that to a bishop who doesn't have to pay his own rent it makes perfect sense for the lucky few on benefits not to have to pay London rents either.
These are 2010 figures and represent a 8% rise on the 2009 figures, so while the rest of the country suffers from reduced living standards at least the bishops are doing well.
Now not all of that money comes from their residential housing portfolio - they also own many big shopping centres and profit from investments made abroad and in farm land, but they are very efficient at maximising the return on investment of all of their funds, especially by raising rents to market levels.
The Bishops have just increased the rent for people who work, reduced the amount of money available to many welfare benefit recipients who live outside London just so that a few can live in big houses in expensive London areas. They then pay themselves out of the profits they make from charging high rents on homes owned by their pension fund. Those profits will be higher if the welfare state pushes up rents by subsidising people who could never afford to live in these expensive areas. In effect, the bishops have voted to increase their own income.
Not surprisingly, the Bishops themselves are against an elected House of Lords. 26 Bishops from the Church of England sit in the Lords. Other faiths have no equivalent rights, even though the Church of England is losing parishioners at a rapid rate and more people attend Catholic churches regularly than Church of England churches.
Still, declining Church of England attendance is not a problem for the Bishops. When churches close they are sold off and the proceeds put into the Church Commissioners investment fund. That is then used to buy more residential property in London to rent out at a profit and the profits given to the Bishops who let the attendances fall.
It seems that the unelected elite in this country will get richer if they do a good or bad job.
Update:
The amendment was proposed by the Bishop of Ripon and Leeds, the Rt Rev John Packer.
He received £134,624 from the CofE investment fund in 2010 (up from £116,091 in 2009, a 15% increase).
Part of that money came from:
- the sale of empty churches (the profits of which go into the fund)
- higher London rents
- higher food prices (via high and rising farm rents)
- higher retail prices (from high shopping centre rents)
- higher UK unemployment (from competition from foreign jobs created by foreign investments by the fund)
- poor countries like Vietnam (which receive Foreign Aid from the tax payer but pay out profits to the investment fund) etc.
- tax avoidance (by claiming to be a charity but still operating to make profits rather than doing good work)
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