• Question by: Valerie Shawcross
• Meeting date: 19 July 2006

I concur with your experience, Bishop, about the work of faith groups within the community, and I have seen some excellent, proactive work done by faith groups. However, there does seem to me to be a gap, and I wonder if my anecdotal experience is confirmed by your broader experience, that even some of the most energetic and creative churches, and, indeed, mosques, where they are falling over themselves with political visitors, nonetheless find that, when it comes to cutting the deal, and getting some cash resources from the local state, or the state generally, the resource isn't coming into...

• Question by: Valerie Shawcross
• Meeting date: 19 July 2006

So, do you think that there is much more potential for the faith sector to address problems, and help the most extremely poor communities to move on, if they had more support from the state.

• Question by: Tony Arbour
• Meeting date: 19 July 2006

Isn't that precisely the point that I have been making: that you are sitting there waiting for the poor to come to you, rather than' Brian Coleman (Chairman): I do not quite think that that is what the Bishop said at all, Mr Arbour, to intervene on his behalf. The Bishop can explain himself.

• Question by: Tony Arbour
• Meeting date: 19 July 2006

Is being more effective you going out and knocking on people's doors, saying: `You are poor. You need help from us. You need our charity'?

• Question by: Tony Arbour
• Meeting date: 19 July 2006

Bishop, I wonder if you think that the function of the church ought to be more proactive? Things you have just been talking about; advice groups and playgroups and all of that kind of thing, is that that people all come to you, ought you not to be going to the people?

• Question by: Dee Doocey
• Meeting date: 19 July 2006

So, are you saying that you don't think that much money is needed?

• Question by: Dee Doocey
• Meeting date: 19 July 2006

I would be interested in the panel's view of the findings of the Joseph Rowntree Trust that said that £4-5 billion per annum is going to be needed from the Government in order to reach the targets. That just seems such an extraordinarily large figure, I would be interested to know how the panel felt about that.

• Question by: John Biggs
• Meeting date: 19 July 2006

I think this is a fantastically important matter, and I suppose the problem I have with Dee Doocey's question is that it's very easy to try to put a number on this and say that £4 billion will solve the problem. I think we all know that out there there's a scepticism in the wider public that we are spending more on public services. I'd like more to be spent on my constituency in East London. People are asking whether we are getting sufficient value out of it, whether our services are sufficiently functional and so on, so clearly, there...

• Question by: Murad Qureshi
• Meeting date: 19 July 2006

I understand that there should be a London rate, and I think there has been work done on that, on the living wage. Coming back to Kate (Green)'s point that tax credits are more significant, one of the experiences I have come across is that the bureaucracy of targeted financial programmes can be such that it actually puts off a lot of people from sitting down and putting in the applications that they are perfectly entitled to make. I don't know if you have got any thoughts on that, and how that can be cleared up so that it's a...

• Question by: Damian Hockney
• Meeting date: 19 July 2006

Would you all support the idea, then, of removing from tax, the poor, as other countries are gradually doing? We should stop taking money away from the ones we are defining as poor, which leaves them poor, and creates dependency upon the state, while still worrying about the number of and the percentage of people in poverty. Surely, we should strip out their tax, get rid of their taxation, remove it. Many of them will then immediately not be poor. Surely we would all agree with that.